One of my pre-pandemic, end of the academic year, June treats had become a trip down to London to take part in, and absorb the atmosphere and events at, the annual CogX Festival. It’s a rare event where academics, policymakers, technologists, industry people and many more come together to share knowledge around all things AI. As part of a series of public events for the Andrew W. Mellon Sawyer Seminar – Histories of AI: A Genealogy of Power – myself, co-organiser Richard Staley, and our postdoctoral research associate Jonnie Penn took part in 2021’s hybrid CogX Festival. We talked about what we’ve been doing on the Seminar for the past year, about some of the themes that have guided our discussions, and about AI and climate change. I spoke about AI and stories, drawing off the many things I’ve learnt over the course of the Seminar, thinking that has gone into and come out of the new book, Storylistening: Narrative Evidence and Public Reasoning, and research that’s informing my plans for the next book (I think!), on the intersections of AI research and literature in the mid-twentieth century.
Tag Archives: climate change
‘Is Climate Change Actually Being Taken Seriously?’ – University of Cambridge ‘Mind Over Chatter’ Podcast Episode
In this last episode of the first series of the University of Cambridge’s new podcast – Mind Over Chatter – I joined Richard Staley (Reader in the History and Philosophy of Science department) and Martin Rees (cosmologist, astrophysicist, and Astronomer Royal), to explore how stories relate to climate change. It was fun to do some audio work again after a break from radio for a while. It was also good to have an opportunity to try out some of the ideas from the new book, Storylistening: Narrative Evidence and Public Reasoning, to which we’re currently putting the finishing touches, in particular work in the book on understanding narratives as models.
Richard is one of my collaborators on the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar – Histories of AI: A Geneaology of Power – which we’ve been running since Spring 2020, and which has been one of the most phenomenal experience of my professional career. But Richard is also leading another important research project – Making Climate History – so it was good to have an opportunity to talk with him about climate change, rather than AI, although the two are of course intimately connected, as Richard has discussed elsewhere.
This episode was produced by Nick Saffell, James Dolan, and Naomi Clements-Brod.