Category Archives: Announcements

AI: Fact vs Fiction with Ian McEwan and Murray Shanahan at The Barbican

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downloadI’ve been cutting back on my public work lately in order to focus more on my academic research and writing, but when the Barbican asked if I’d like to host an event on AI: Fact vs Fiction with Ian McEwan and Murray Shanahan I couldn’t say no. I’d just finished McEwan’s new novel, Machines Like Me, and have known and respected Murray for many years now.

The event was part of a range of public activities taking place around the Barbican’s AI: More Than Human exhibition, and part of McEwan’s public events promoting the publication of the new novel. The evening wasn’t focused on the novel and I’ll save my views on it, and on McEwan’s comments on SF in interview about it, for another post. Rather, that evening we were focused on exploring the history of our AI imaginings and their relation to the actual science. The podcast of the discussion is available here.

Final Literary Pursuit for Me: Golding’s Lord of the Flies

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download-1The eighth episode of my documentary series Literary Pursuits aired this weekend on BBC Radio 3 and can be heard again here. It tells the story of how Golding’s Lord of the Flies made it off the reject pile at Faber and Faber into becoming one of the most iconic novels of the twentieth century. It was incredibly special to interview Golding’s daughter Judy Carver, and to see Golding’s journals, which very few people have ever had access to. In fact, all my interviewees were just wonderful for this programme, the story came easily, and it was, as always, a total pleasure to work with my producer Sara Conkey. The story itself, unexpectedly for us, ended up in fact being rather sad. Which made it even more poignant that this was the final episode of Literary Pursuits Sara and I are to make together. Researching, writing and recording these programmes over the past four years has been a joyous experience. I have learnt so much, both about the novels we worked on and their stories, and about how to make compelling radio documentaries whilst staying true to my scholarly values. I have travelled across Britain, and across the channel, and have conducted interviews I will never forget – sitting with Diana Athill as she shared her memories of Jean Rhys and the journey to publication of Wide Sargasso Sea is perhaps the greatest of the many privileges and pleasures that making this series has afforded. Unfortunately, Literary Pursuits has also required a huge amount of time and creative energy, both of which I now wish to devote more exclusively to my academic work, and to my family. It was a hard decision to stand down as writer and presenter, but I hope that people will still listen to the eight episodes we made and take as much pleasure and knowledge from them in the listening as we gained in the making.

 

 

AI Narratives at the Global Governance of AI Roundtable, World Government Summit, Dubai

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This month I experienced a new country and a new downloadenvironment as I took our AI Narratives research to Dubai for the World Government Summit. I had the privilege to chair a session on underrepresented narratives at the Global Governance of AI Roundtable, hosted at the WGS. We discussed what kind of narratives dominate around AI, who is telling them, whose voices aren’t being heard and, most importantly given the purposes of the event, developed five policy recommendations in order to redress some of the inequities we’d identified. After the GGAR, I experienced the rest of the WGS, primarily attending sessions on either AI, or on women and leadership. The latter were particularly inspiring, from hearing Helen Clark (former Prime Minister of New Zealand) talk about her experiences of national leadership, to listening to Sarah Al Amiri (the UAE’s Minister of State for Advanced Sciences) share her story of scientific endeavour and leadership. It certainly did not feel natural being a humanities academic in such a policy-focused and political environment, but I was not the only one there and we all shared a common belief in the increasing importance of the presence of humanities scholars in these kinds of spaces. The benefits are reciprocal: we bring knowledge and skills that others present do not; but we also learn from interacting outside of our comfortable environments – it is challenging to one’s sense of established norms and values, but sometimes we need these to be challenged in order to reaffirm, or adjust them, in the context of an ever-changing world. 

First Story Young Writers’ Festival at the University of Cambridge

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downloadAs part of the activities spinning out from the University’s partnership with the BBC and First Story on the short story awards, for the first year First Story held its Young Writers’ Festival on the Sidgwick Campus at Cambridge, on 25th September 2018. On the day, we welcomed 330 students between the ages of 11 and 17 from 19 schools across the East Midlands, London, Lancashire and East and West Yorkshire. The day was supported by more than 40 teachers, 26 writers and 25 volunteers. It was a packed programme, including 42 intensive creative writing workshops which ran throughout the day, led by 23 acclaimed writers including poets, playwrights and novelists. By the end of it, over 740 pieces of creative writing had been produced by students, teachers, and volunteers. More than 320 books were also bought by students and taken back across the country to new homes.

It was an absolute pleasure to see the campus I walked onto in 1995 for my first lecture as an undergraduate, terrified and bewildered at the new world I’d just been deposited in by my parents, buzzing with young people full of creativity, enthusiasm and a real sense of ownership of the space. I had fun chairing the plenary session with writers, Kei Miller, Shivanee Ramlochan, and Stephen Kelman, and attempting to field the many questions we were inundated with from an overwhelmingly engaged audience. The highlight though was the final session in which pupils took over the stage in the Lady Mitchell Hall and delivered the writing they’d created during the day – it was a deeply moving and powerful experience, and sometimes a very funny one, and was proof, if ever it’s needed, of the power and importance of creative writing as a way for young people to process their experiences of the world.

 

 

Time Travelling on BBC Radio 3’s Essential Classics

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woman-3303560_1280I have become a time traveller. Not literally, unfortunately, but in name at least, as I join the team of Time Travellers on BBC Radio 3’s Essential Classics. Time Travellers is a fun feature which goes out Monday to Friday at about 10.10am, in which presenters pique listeners’ interest with a quirky slice of cultural history. I’ve told stories about how Dorothy Parker’s ashes ended up at the Baltimore Headquarters of the NAACP, how one of Samuel Beckett’s ghost stories was rejected for being too creepy, and, one of my favourites, how George Bernard Shaw is responsible for Amazon’s Echo being gendered female, even though she doesn’t know why. More stories from me during the course of 2018; in the meantime, go here for some of the best journeys of the Time Travellers team.

Pursuing the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and My Hyde

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1600px-Dr_Jekyll_and_Mr_Hyde_poster_edit2My BBC Radio 3 documentary series, Literary Pursuits, continues this Sunday with a rollicking investigation into the story behind the writing of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Recording took us from Edinburgh to Oxford and at one point required retracing Stevenson’s childhood footsteps with the help of SatNav! I taught Jekyll and Hyde for many years when at the University of St Andrews, but I have to say that it was only through making this documentary that I fully came to understand all its many layers. People often ask me what the relationship is between my academic work and my broadcasting – the answer is that it’s a symbiotic one. I couldn’t make the radio programmes that I want to make without my academic expertise, but the influence, effect and benefit is never just in that direction. I always learn so much from my radio work, both in terms of new knowledge acquired, but also in terms of that for some reason “dreaded” thing, transferable skills. Radio is through and through both a collaborative and creative endeavour, and my communication, team work, and written skills are so much stronger for it. They’re all skills that us academics could do with strengthening every so often!

Talking AI Narratives with the Today Programme

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The AI Narratives project at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence is one of the most exciting research projects I’ve ever been involved in, combining traditional individual scholarly research (we are all writing monographs connected in some way or other with the project), collaborative outputs (two edited collections and a journal special issue are currently in preparation) as well as significant and genuinely impactful outfacing work, facilitated by our collaboration with the Royal Society. The project website will be updated in the Spring so that we can share information about all the things we are doing more easily, but in the meantime we’re carrying on with our academic research and public engagement in earnest. I marked the end of 2017 with a brief appearance on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme (available here @ 1.53.13) in which I was at pains to counter media sensationalism with a message about the importance of analysing and diversifying popular narratives about AI if the technology is to provide a future we all want, rather than the one some of us fear.

Global Cambridge in New York – Why Literature Matters

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Last week I was fortunate enough to enjoy my first visit ever to New York as part of a work trip to take part in Global Cambridge’s New York City Vice-Chancellor Welcome Reception for Cambridge’s new VC, Professor Stephen Toope.

I joined Professor Toope and Professor Geoffrey Ward, Principal of Homerton College, in front of gathered alumni to discuss why literature matters, and the importance and role of storytelling in the contemporary world. It’s a topic that’s crucial to the research and thinking that I am doing at the moment on the AI Narratives project at CFI, as well as to my public advocacy for the value and importance of literature and literary criticism in the twenty-first century. FB_IMG_1513032563210

But the importance and seriousness of the topic didn’t prevent us from having a good laugh on occasion as well, as is clear from the photographic evidence!

 

University of Cambridge Partners with the BBC and First Story for the National Short Story Awards

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NSSA_StackedSCA_StackedYWA_StackedOver the past year I have been working hard to broker a partnership between the University of Cambridge, the literary charity First Story, and the BBC on the BBC National Short Story Award, the BBC Young Writers’ Award and the BBC Student Critics’ Award. It is wonderful that today we open the call for submissions for the 2018 awards, the first of the three year partnership, with a fantastic line-up of judges.

Stig Abell and Katie Thistleton will chair the 2018 panels of judges for the BBC National Short Story Award and BBC Young Writers’ Award respectively. Abell and Thistleton will be joined by an esteemed group of award-winning writers and poets on their respective panels. For the BBC National Short Story Award: short story writer and 2016 BBC NSSA winner, K J Orr and Granta’s ‘20 under 40’ novelist, Benjamin Markovits, one of last year’s shortlisted writers, returning judge, Di Speirs, Books Editor at BBC Radio, and multi award winning poet and Cambridge alumni Sarah Howe. For the BBC Young Writers’ Award, Thistleton will lead Carnegie Medal-winning YA author and former teacher, Sarah Crossan, celebrated poet Dean Atta, adult and YA author William Sutcliffe and bestselling author, actress, singer and vlogger, Carrie Hope Fletcher.

The BBC National Short Story Award is one of the most prestigious for a single short story, with the winning author receiving £15,000, and four further shortlisted authors £600 each. The shortlisted writers for the BBC Young Writers’ Award will have their stories featured on the BBC Radio 1, Cambridge University and First Story websites, with the winner’s story broadcast on the radio station. In addition, a new initiative, the BBC Student Critics’ Award with First Story and Cambridge University (SCA), will give selected 16-18 year olds around the UK the opportunity to read, discuss and critique the five shortlisted NSSA stories from Easter 2018.

The charity First Story will support the YWA and BBC SCA with further activity that will engage young people with reading, writing and listening to short stories. The University of Cambridge will support all three awards, including hosting a short story symposium at the Institute of Continuing Education on 7th July 2018, and curating an exclusive online exhibition of artefacts drawn from the University Library’s archive, to inspire and intrigue potential entrants of the YWA.

I am delighted that the University has become involved in a partnership that promises so much in terms of supporting and raising the profile of the short story nationally, as well as encouraging the creative and literary ambitions of Britain’s young adults, and helping Cambridge to reach out across the country, raising aspirations and ambitions.

Full details of the 2018 Awards launch can be found here.

 

 

 

Let the Future Commence…

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With Deconstruction, Feminism, Film submitted and with it a number of intellectual questions I’ve been wrestling with for over a decade put to rest, I am now delightedly embracing my research on science fiction, and on science and literature. This work began whilst I was at St Andrews and has been bubbling along over the past three years, but it took a back seat to prioritise finishing the film book. Now it gets to take centre stage! Earlier this month, I joined the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence as a Senior Research Fellow and co-Project Lead on the AI Narratives project. I’ll be working alongside co-Project Leads Dr Stephen Cave, Executive Director of CFI, and Claire Craig, Director of Science and Policy at the Royal Society, as well as Kanta Dihal, our postdoctoral researcher and Associate Fellow, Dr Beth Singler. It’s a great team, and an exciting three year project to explore how AI is currently portrayed in literary, cinematic and other cultural narratives, what impact that might be having, and what we can learn from how other complex, novel technologies have been communicated. The Royal Society have also generously funded a more focused reboot of the What Scientists Read research I carried out with a multidisciplinary team in Scotland, so watch this space for updates on the AI Narratives project and on What AI Researchers Read…