Andrew Crofts on the Change Agent, the Ghostwriter and the Singularity

A couple of months ago I saw Roman Polanski’s film the Ghost Writer based on the titular bestselling book by Robert Harris. At the time, I could hardly imagine that only a couple of months after the movie premiere I will be communicating with Andrew Crofts – the archetype ghostwriter on whom Ewan McGregor’s character was most probably based upon. Andrew wrote a popular guest article for SingularityWeblog.com where he shared the story behind his latest book The Change Agent: How to Create a Wonderful World. The book talks about the life and ideas of Andrew’s archetype change agent – James Martin, a world-renowned futurist, computer scientist, author, lecturer and, among many other things, the largest donor in the history of Oxford University. (Most recently, James Martin produced a pivotal documentary film called The Meaning of the 21st Century. It is based on Martin’s titular book and examines the major perils and promises that humanity faces in the 21st century such as climate change, the technological singularity and others.) Given the relevance of Andrew’s topic and the success of his guest blog post, I decided to ask him to do an interview for Singularity 1 on 1. We ended up having a 46 minute conversation during which we discussed a variety of interesting topics such as: Andrew’s experience as a guest on James Martin’s private island; the story behind, the accuracy and the goals of Crofts’ book The Change Agent; James Martin‘s life and ideas in general and his take on the future of humanity, technology and the singularity in particular.