The most highly anticipated development in AI this year is probably the expected arrival of AI agents, also referred to as “agentic AI”. We are told that AI agents have the potential to reshape how individuals and organizations interact with technology.

Our guest to help us explore this is Tom Davenport, Distinguished Professor in Information Technology and Management at Babson College, and a globally recognized thought leader in the areas of analytics, data science, and artificial intelligence. Tom has written, co-authored, or edited about twenty books, including "Competing on Analytics" and "The AI Advantage." He has worked extensively with leading organizations and has a unique perspective on the transformative impact of AI across industries. He has recently co-authored an article in the MIT Sloan Management Review, “Five Trends in AI and Data Science for 2025”, which included a section on AI agents – which is why we invited him to talk about the subject.

Selected follow-ups:

• Tom Davenport - personal site
• Five Trends in AI and Data Science for 2025 - MIT Sloan Management Review
• Michael Martin Hammer - Wikipedia
• AI winter - Wikipedia
• AI is coming for the OnlyFans chat industry - Fortune
• How Gen AI and Analytical AI Differ — and When to Use Each - Harvard Business Review
• Truth Terminal - The AI Bot That Became a Crypto Millionaire - a16z
• Jim Simons - Wikipedia
• Why The "Godfather of AI" Now Fears His Own Creation - Curt Jaimungal
  interviews Geoffrey Hinton
• Attention Is All You Need - Google researchers
• Apple suspends error-strewn AI generated news alerts - BBC News
• Gen AI cuts costs by 30% - London Futurists Podcast episode featuring David Wakeling, partner at A&O Shearman
• The path to agentic automation is UiPath - UiPath
• Microsoft CEO Predicts: "AI Agents Will Replace ALL Software" - AI Insights Explorer
• NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang Keynote at CES 2025 - Nvidia
• Pioneering Safe, Efficient AI - Conscium
• A New Survey Of Generative AI Shows Lots Of Work To Do - October 2023 article by Tom Davenport

Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify

In this episode, we return to a theme which is likely to become increasingly central to public discussion in the months and years ahead. To use a term coined by this podcast’s cohost Calum Chace, this theme is the Economic Singularity, namely the potential all-round displacement of humans from the workforce by ever more capable automation. That leads to the question: what are our options for managing the transition of society to increasing technological unemployment and technological underemployment.

Our guest, who will be sharing his thinking on these questions, is the prolific writer and YouTuber David Shapiro. As well as keeping on top of fast-changing news about innovations in AI, David has been developing a set of ideas he calls post-labour economics – how an economy might continue to function even if humans can no longer gain financial rewards in direct return for their labour.

Selected follow-ups:

• David Shapiro’s Substack
• David Shapiro's channel on YouTube
• Julia McCoy's channel on YouTube
• Next stop: Miami - Waymo
• Resource Based Economy
• Debt: The First 5,000 Years - book by David Graeber
• Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better - book by Lyn Alden
• The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking - book by Saifedean Ammous
• Normalcy bias - Wikipedia
• Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty - book by Daron Acemoğlu and James A. Robinson
• Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail - book by Ray Dalio
• Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom - book by Grace Blakeley
• The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and Fully Automated Luxury Capitalism - book by Calum Chace

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify

Our guests in this episode have been described as the world’s two oldest scientifically astute longevity activists. They are Kenneth Scott, aged 82, who is based in Florida, and Helga Sands, aged 86, who lives in London.

David has met both of them several times at a number of longevity events, and they always impress him, not only with their vitality and good health, but also with the level of knowledge and intelligence they apply to the question of which treatments are the best, for them personally and for others, to help keep people young and vibrant.

Selected follow-ups:

• Waiting For God - 1990s BBC Comedy
• Adelle Davis, Nutritionist
• Roger J. Williams, Biochemist
• The Importance of Maintaining a Low Omega-6/Omega-3 Ratio
• Life Extension Magazine
• California Age Management Institute
• Fibrinogen and aging
• Professor Angus Dalgleish, Nuffield Health
• About Aubrey de Grey speaking at the Royal Institution
• George Church, Geneticist
• James Kirkland, Mayo Clinic
• Daniel Munoz-Espin, Cambridge
• Nobel Prize for John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka
• VSELs and S.O.N.G. laser
• Xtend Optimal Health
• Follistatin gene therapy, Minicircle
• Exosomes vs Stem Cells
• Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease - book by Caldwell Esselstyn Jr
• Dasatinib and Quercetin (senolytics)
• We reverse atherosclerosis - Repair Biotechnologies
• Bioreactor-Grown Mitochondria - Mitrix
• Nobel Winner Shinya Yamanaka: Cell Therapy Is ‘Very Promising’ For Cancer, Parkison's, More
• Death of the world's oldest man, 25th Nov 2024
• Blueprint protocol - Bryan Johnson

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify

Our guest in this episode is Jeff LaPorte, a software engineer, entrepreneur and investor based in Vancouver, who writes Road to Artificia, a newsletter about discovering the principles of post‑AI societies.

Calum recently came across Jeff's article “Valuing Humans in the Age of Superintelligence: HumaneRank” and thought it had some good, original ideas, so we wanted to invite Jeff onto the podcast and explore them.

Selected follow-ups:

• Jeff LaPorte personal business website
• Road to Artificia: A newsletter about discovering the principles of societies post‑AI
• Valuing Humans in the Age of Superintelligence: HumaneRank
• Ideas Lying Around - article by Cory Doctorow about a famous saying by Milton Friedman
• PageRank - Wikipedia
• Nosedive (Black Mirror episode) - IMDb
• The Economic Singularity - book by Calum Chace
• World Chess Championship 2024 - WIkipedia
• WALL.E (2008 movie) - IMDb
• A day in the life of Asimov, 2045 - short story by David Wood
• Why didn't electricity immediately change manufacturing? - by Tim Harford, BBC
• Responsible use of artificial intelligence in government - Government of Canada
• Bipartisan House Task Force Report on Artificial Intelligence - U.S. House of Representatives

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify

Our subject in this episode is altruism – our human desire and instinct to assist each other, making some personal sacrifices along the way. More precisely, our subject is the possible future of altruism – a future in which our philanthropic activities – our charitable donations, and how we spend our discretionary time – could have a considerably greater impact than at present. The issue is that many of our present activities, which are intended to help others, aren’t particularly effective.

That’s the judgement reached by our guest today, Stefan Schubert. Stefan is a researcher in philosophy and psychology, currently based in Stockholm, Sweden, and has previously held roles at the LSE and the University of Oxford. Stefan is the co-author of the recently published book “Effective Altruism and the Human Mind”.

Selected follow-ups:

• Stefan Schubert - Effective Altruism
• Effective Altruism and the Human Mind: The Clash Between Impact and Intuition - Oxford University Press (open access)
• Centre for Effective Altruism
• Professor Nadira Faber - Uehiro Institute, Oxford
• What are the best charities to support in 2024? - Giving What We Can
• Effective Altruist Leaders Were Repeatedly Warned About Sam Bankman-Fried Years Before FTX Collapsed - Time
• Virtues for Real-World Utilitarians - by Stefan Schubert & Lucius Caviola, Utilitarianism
• Deworming - Effective Altruism Forum
• What we know about Musk's cost-cutting mission - BBC article about DOGE
• What is your p(doom)? with Darren McKee
• Longtermism - Wikipedia

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify

Our guest in this episode is Amory Lovins, a distinguished environmental scientist, and co-founder of RMI, which he co-founded in 1982 as Rocky Mountain Institute. It’s what he calls a think do and scale tank, with 700 people in 62 countries, and a budget of well over $100m a year.

For over five decades, Amory has championed innovative approaches to energy systems, advocating for a world where energy services are delivered with least cost and least impact. He has advised all manner of governments, companies, and NGOs, and published 31 books and over 900 papers. It’s an over-used word, but in this case it is justified: Amory is a true thought leader in the global energy transition.

Selected follow-ups:

• Inside Amory's Brain - RMI
• Get to know us - RMI
• Books by Amory B. Lovins - Goodreads
• Reinventing Fire - RMI
• Integrative Design: A Practice to Tackle Complex Challenges - Stanford d.school
• What is Integrative Design? - RMI

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify

Some people say that all that’s necessary to improve the capabilities of AI is to scale up existing systems. That is, to use more training data, to have larger models with more parameters in them, and more computer chips to crunch through the training data. However, in this episode, we’ll be hearing from a computer scientist who thinks there are many other options for improving AI. He is Alexander Ororbia, a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York State, where he directs the Neural Adaptive Computing Laboratory.

David had the pleasure of watching Alex give a talk at the AGI 2024 conference in Seattle earlier this year, and found it fascinating. After you hear this episode, we hope you reach a similar conclusion.

Selected follow-ups:

• Alexander Ororbia - Rochester Institute of Technology
• Alexander G. Ororbia II - Personal website
• AGI-24: The 17th Annual AGI Conference - AGI Society
• Joseph Tranquillo - Bucknell University
• Hopfield network - Wikipedia
• Karl Friston - UCL
• Predictive coding - Wikipedia
• Mortal Computation: A Foundation for Biomimetic Intelligence - Quantitative Biology
• The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory? - Nature Reviews Neuroscience
• I Am a Strange Loop (book by Douglas Hofstadter) - Wikipedia
• Mark Solms - Wikipedia
• Conscium: Pioneering Safe, Efficient AI
• The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness (book by Mark Solms)
• Carver Mead - Wikipedia
• Event camera (includes Dynamic Vision Sensors) - Wikipedia
• ICRA (International Conference on Robotics and Automation)
• Brain-Inspired Machine Intelligence: A Survey of Neurobiologically-Plausible Credit Assignment
• A Review of Neuroscience-Inspired Machine Learning
• ngc-learn
• Taking Neuromorphic Computing to the Next Level with Loihi 2 Technology Brief - Intel

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify

In David's life so far, he has read literally hundreds of books about the future. Yet none has had such a provocative title as this: “The future loves you: How and why we should abolish death”. That’s the title of the book written by the guest in this episode, Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston. Ariel is a neuroscientist, and a Research Fellow at Monash University, in Melbourne, Australia.

One of the key ideas in Ariel’s book is that so long as your connectome – the full set of the synapses in your brain – continues to exist, then you continue to exist. Ariel also claims that brain preservation – the preservation of the connectome, long after we have stopped breathing – is already affordable enough to be provided to essentially everyone. These claims raise all kinds of questions, which are addressed in this conversation.

Selected follow-ups:

• Dr Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston - personal website
• Book webpage - includes details of when Ariel is speaking in the UK and elsewhere
• Monash Neuroscience of Consciousness
• Deep hypothermic circulatory arrest - Wikipedia
• Sentience and the Origins of Consciousness - article by Karl Friston that mentions bacteria
• List of advisors to Conscium
• Does the UK use £15,000, £30,000 or a £70,000 per QALY cost effectiveness threshold? by Jason Shafrin
• Researchers simulate an entire fly brain on a laptop. Is a human brain next? - US Berkeley News
• What are memories made of? A survey of neuroscientists on the structural basis of long-term memory - Preprint by Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston, Emil Kendziora, and Andrew McKenzie

Related previous episodes:

• Ep 91: The low-cost future of preserving brains, with Jordan Sparks
• Ep 77: The case for brain preservation, with Kenneth Hayworth

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify