Why AI Agents Must Be Verified (Calum Chace Explains) | Voices From The Future (2036)

When AI can do almost every job, people can no longer earn their living through wages. Futurist Calum Chace calls this the economic singularity, and he says almost nobody is planning for it. For finance leaders, that is not a distant theory. It is a question about cost bases, controls and who owns the value AI creates.

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This is Episode 1 of Voices From The Future (2036), a new series on Diary of a CFO and The King Dems Podcast. Each episode asks one of the world's leading futurists, founders or finance leaders what the decade to 2036 will demand of leaders, and what they should do now so it does not catch them by surprise.

Calum Chace, known to many as "the AI guy", is a futurist, keynote speaker and bestselling author of Surviving AI and The Economic Singularity. He is one of five co-founders of Conscium and its Chief Marketing Officer. Conscium explores whether machines can become conscious and runs an agent verification platform. Before writing about AI, Calum spent 30 years in journalism and business, including at KPMG.

Calum grew up on Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick, but assumed human-level AI was centuries away. Then in 1999 he read Ray Kurzweil and realised superintelligence could arrive in his lifetime. Colleagues tired of hearing about it and called him "the AI guy" sarcastically. He kept the name.

In this episode:

• The economic singularity, a term Calum coined in 2016, and why economists must design the post-automation economy now
• Who will own a fully automated economy, and why sharing its wealth may be the hardest problem of all
• Shadow AI and the "phony war": why most large companies have not deployed AI at scale yet
• Conscium's five levels of AI agents and why agents need verifying before and during deployment
• Ademola's offload, extend and elevate model for AI agents
• Calum's timeline: possibly 10 to 20 years, and a 50 per cent chance of AGI by 2035
• Why AGI is a fleeting moment and superintelligence is the issue that matters
• The "jagged edge": judgement, volition, common sense and a world model that AI still lacks
• The five human revolutions (fire, cognition, agriculture, industry, information) and why AI is not the fourth industrial revolution
• Host and guest disagree: Ademola argues AI will remain a tool given uneven adoption across Africa and the developing world. Calum counters that this argues for slow dispersal, not against arrival, pointing to how fast smartphones and large language models spread

Calum Chace, futurist and co-founder of Conscium, on the economic singularity, AI agents, AGI and the future of finance and work, on Diary of a CFO with Ademola Odewade.

More from Calum Chace:
Website: calumchace.com
Conscium: conscium.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/calum-chace-bb68168

Hosted by Ademola Odewade: chartered accountant, author of Human-Led, AI-Powered Finance (foreword by Professor Dave Ulrich) and Founder of K-DEMS Consulting.

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