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This lecture addresses the potential links between AI and religious belief, which include the question of whether an artificial “superintelligence”, were one to arise, would be well-disposed towards us.
This lecture explores these notions through an examination of the film Silent Running (1972), which imagined gardens in space, in which the last remnants of Earth’s vegetation are preserved aboard gigantic spaceships.
This lecture examines the work of Hugo de Vries, a Dutch botanist who was one of the first to claim that science would allow plants and animals to be designed to order.
The question “Will AI artefacts ever be conscious?” was raised by Turing seventy years ago, and will not go away even though no one quite knows what it means, nor how we would know they were conscious if they were.
This lecture will begin with Bacon’s imagined garden, then consider the long-term promise of the experimental or scientific garden, which would eventually lead to today’s biotechnologies.
2019 marks 100 years since the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 when a woman was recognised as a ‘person’ in law. This groundbreaking Act enabled women to be awarded university degrees and to enter professions such as law and medicine from which they had been barred.
Hans Holbein the Younger, portraitist, muralist, designer of jewellery and precious metalware, spent half of his distinguished career in London during the turbulent reign of King Henry VIII.
This lecture starts by looking at early-modern understandings of the nature of ‘animal’ and ‘human’ life, before turning to the rise of ‘rights of animals’.