Calum Chace

Before becoming a leading voice on artificial intelligence, Calum Chace built a 30-year career in business as a CEO, marketer and strategy consultant, advising companies on navigating disruption long before AI became the disruptor-in-chief. Today, he brings an unusually grounded intellect to AI debates often dominated by hype. Where some see AI as a technical challenge or an economic disruptor, Chace sees it as a civilisational turning point. One that could liberate humanity from the necessity of labour, or plunge it into a crisis of meaning. Either way, business as usual is not an option.

The belief that machines won’t replace “cognitive jobs”? Wishful thinking, he says. That humans without jobs would be lost and purposeless? Look at retirees, children, and the idle rich. A society liberated from labour should aim higher than mere subsistence. This provocative mix of realism and optimism is why Chace has delivered more than 120 keynotes in 18 countries across five continents.

Chace’s books including The Economic Singularity and Surviving AI have become essential reading for anyone trying to parse the mid-to-long-term implications of exponential technology. In them, he explores not only the plausibility of widespread “technological unemployment,” but also its potential desirability. The idea that humans must forever earn their right to exist by working, he argues, is a cultural assumption ripe for revision.

Calum Chace is a co-founder of Conscium, a pioneering startup focused on developing indicators of machine intelligence and scaling neuromorphic computing. He also co-hosts the London Futurist Podcast, a dynamic weekly series where he explores AI, data usage, longevity research, and the simulation hypothesis. In a world racing toward superintelligence, Chace is that rare commentator who slows us down long enough to ask what kind of future we’re actually building and whether we’ll be ready for it when it arrives.