Examines how cultural narratives, metaphors and expectations shape public understanding of AI. Drawing on Stephen Cave’s research into the history and cultural construction of intelligence, the talk considers how mythology, literature, philosophy and popular culture have influenced the ways societies imagine intelligent machines.
It opens a conversation about the origins of the hopes, fears, emotions and expectations that surround AI today, while asking how these inherited narratives continue to shape ideas about intelligence, agency, technological possibility and risk.
Dr. Stephen Cave
Professor Stephen Cave is Academic Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and Co-Director of the Institute for Technology and Humanity, both at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on philosophy and ethics of technology, particularly AI, robotics and life-extension. He is the author of Immortality (Crown, 2012), a New Scientist book of the year, and Should You Choose To Live Forever: A Debate (with John Martin Fischer, Routledge, 2023); and co-editor of AI Narratives (Oxford, 2020), Feminist AI (Oxford, 2023) and Imagining AI (Oxford, 2023). He writes widely about philosophy, technology and society, including for the Guardian and Atlantic. He also advises governments around the world, and has served as a British diplomat.