Listen to one of our most popular lectures from 2019, as Dr Beth Singler uses examples from her anthropological research to show how we are imagining our future, and how we are changing ourselves to suit the machines.

Slides for this lecture can be found here

Speakers

Dr Beth Singler is the Homerton Junior Research Fellow in Artificial Intelligence, where she is exploring the social, philosophical, ethical, and religious implications of advances in AI and robotics from an anthropological perspective. Beth has appeared on Radio4’s Today, Sunday and Start the Week programmes discussing AI, robots, and pain.

She was one of the Evening Standard’s Progress 1000 – the list of the most influential people in various fields in both 2017 and 2018. She has also spoken on AI and human identity at the Science Museum, Cheltenham Science Festival, the Barbican, the Being Human Festival, and the Cambridge Festival of Ideas. In 2018 she spoke at the Edinburgh Science Festival, the Cheltenham Science Festival, Ars Electronica, and New Scientist Live.

Alumni information: Homerton 1999

Reading list

Superintelligence: Paths, dangers, strategies by Nick Bostrom (OUP, 2014)

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil (Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd, 2006)

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Professor Shoshana Zuboff

To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death by Mark O'Connell

Apocalyptic AI: Visions of Heaven in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual Reality by Robert Geraci