Little did I know when I was in Paris at the UNESCO Futures Literacy Forum in December last year, that it was likely to be my last trip abroad for some time. As all of us contend with the onset of the pandemic, and as many parents and carers are trying to figure out how to juggle home schooling and their jobs, it feels almost nostalgic to see this video published of an interview I gave at the Paris event. In it I talk about how storylistening can enable creative imagining about the future, and how it is needed to inform decision making and create futures that exist, and that ‘we’ want to live in. What I said then resonates differently now, of course, as we contend with a pandemic and even at its outset start to think about what the world might look like, what it needs to look like, afterwards.
Category Archives: Interview
Talking AI Narratives with the Today Programme
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.
BBC Radio 3 Proms Extra Events
The Proms season is upon is and it’s been my pleasure to try my hand at the presenting game. It’s a very different experience asking the questions to being the one answering them, but I enjoyed it just as much, if not more. To be fair, my first gig could not have been easier since my interviewee, Steven Price, may well be an Oscar winner for his score for Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity but he’s also a very lovely guy who’s retained the down-to-earthness of our shared Northern roots. Steven and I talked about film music, Holst and the anxiety of influence in a Proms Extra live audience event which is then produced for broadcast in the interval of that evening’s Proms Concert. With my presenter appetite whetted, I’m looking forward to my next Proms Extra event on Monday 31st August when I’ll be interviewing the great Hermione Lee about Willia Cather, on the centenary of the publication of The Song of the Lark. If you’re free, come and join us at the Royal College of Music, or tune in that evening for the interval broadcast.
The Cloud is More Than Air and Water
Earlier this year I was invited to Norwich to talk about the palimpsest, the subject of my early work but a topic to which I had not returned in recent years. At the symposium I met a talented young designer and filmmaker, Michael James Lewis, who challenged me to consider how the metaphor of the palimpsest might help us think about the contemporary digital age, in particular cloud computing and remote data storage. He did indeed get me thinking, so during the summer he came to visit me in Cambridge and we recorded a long interview on the topic as part of his project, ‘The Cloud is More than Air and Water’. Michael has now turned the interview into a sound piece intercut with his own work and backed by new music composed by his collaborator, Matt Parker, out of sounds recorded at a data storage site. Part I of the recording is now available here, with Part II following shortly.