This week Ross Dawson and Brett King sit down for an unscripted conversation about AI, Energy markets, climate survivability and resilience, mass migration, collaborative intelligence, advanced healthcare and other great topics for a futurists conversation to end out the week. Ross Dawson is one of Asia’s top ranked futurists and advises companies and governments around future-proofing and AI readiness. The future is closer than you think.

This week on The Futurists, HG Wells, Philip K Dick and Prometheus award wining author and Singularity University faculty Ramez Naam talks the future of the world’s energy systems, and how the Russia-Ukraine conflict has had an accelerating effect on systemic energy thinking. Beyond that we get into sci-fi, multi-generational systems thinking, large scale systems design of the 21st and the incentives and levers in the system for leading humanity to a world of free energy and abundance.

Monica Anderson returns to the Futurists to share a radical concept: future AI models based on Darwinism. The “AI epistemologist” shares provocative opinions about where the current crop of generative AI systems went wrong, and why generative AI is computationally expensive and energy intensive, and why scaling AI with hardware will not achieve general intelligence. Instead she offers a radical alternative: a design for machine intelligence that is inspired by biology, and in particular by the Darwinian process of selection. Topics include: why generative AI is not a plagiarism machine; syntax versus semantics and why AI needs both; there is only one algorithm for creativity; and how to construct an AI that consumes a million times less energy.