Category Archives: Events

When will humans change?

Events News Thoughts and speculation No Comments

In the words of Frederik Pohl, my job as a science fiction author is, “to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.”

I’m sure we all have mixed feelings about the future of robotics and artificial intelligence.  I certainly do and it’s such a broad subject that it’s no surprise emerging technologies and science generates big questions. What human activity we value and what it means to be human might not be new questions, but this could be the moment to assess them again.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been spending even more time than usual thinking and reading about robots and artificial intelligence. I’ve outlined some brief thoughts below, but there’s way too much to put into a short blog post like this and others have written whole books about it, not least Max Tegmark in his book Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Continue reading →

Strange Brains, Alien Minds

Events News Projects Thoughts and speculation No Comments

It’s been a very busy few months, you just need to look at my events page to see what I mean. Guess what? Every time I’ve set aside some time to sit down and write a few words about my experiences something else crops up and the chance slip by.

Although it’s a bit late, here’s a very short reflection on my ongoing collaboration with King’s College London and the Human Brain Project. It’s called ‘Transforming Future Science through Science Fiction.’ Continue reading →

Science Fiction and Science Futures

Events In the press News Projects No Comments

Michael Reinsborough, one of the social scientists I worked with on the Bristol Robotics Lab project and co-presented with at the Science in Public conference has written a piece for the Journal of Science Communication about the work.

Here is the abstract and a link to the article.

Science Fiction and Science Futures: Considering the role of fictions in public engagement and science communication work.

Abstract: The imagination of possible scientific futures has a colourful history of interaction with scientific research agendas and public expectations. The 2017 annual UK Science in Public conference included a panel discussing this. Emphasizing fiction as a method for engaging with and mapping the influence of possible futures, this panel discussed the role of science fiction historically, the role of science fiction in public attitudes to artificial intelligence, and its potential as a method for engagement between scientific researchers and publics. Science communication for creating mutually responsive dialogue between research communities and publics about setting scientific research agendas should consider the role of fictions in understanding how futures are imagined by all parties.

https://jcom.sissa.it/archive/16/04/JCOM_1604_2017_C01/JCOM_1604_2017_C07

An eBook from the project is available: