Stephen Cave is Director of the Institute for Technology and Humanity, and of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, both at the University of Cambridge.
Stephen earned a PhD in philosophy from Cambridge. He then joined the British Foreign Office, where he served for nearly a decade as a policy advisor and diplomat before returning to writing and academia. He now holds the grade of Director of Research at the University of Cambridge (full professor equivalent).
His research is mostly in the philosophy and ethics of technology, with two strands. First, he writes about the ethics of AI and robotics. His publications on this include the co-edited volumes AI Narratives (Oxford University Press, 2020), Imagining AI (Oxford University Press, 2023), and Feminist AI (Oxford University Press, 2023).
Second, he writes about the ethics of life-extension and the philosophy of (im)mortality. His publications on this topic include Immortality (Crown, Penguin Random House, 2012), a New Scientist book of the year now available in many other languages, and Should You Choose To Live Forever? (with John Martin Fischer, Routledge, 2023).
His work has been covered in many hundreds of media outlets around the world, from The Atlantic to the Daily Mail. He has written on philosophical and scientific subjects for the Financial Times, Guardian, New York Times and others. He also regularly appears on television and radio, including the BBC and NPR.
Cave, S., & Dihal, K. 2021. ‘AI Will Always Love You’, in Minding the Future: Contemporary Issues in Artificial Intelligence, ed. Dainton, B., Slocombe, W., & Tanyi, A. New York: Springer.
House of Lords Risk Assessment and Risk Planning CommitteeWednesday 13 January 2021 Witness(es): Caroline Gorski, Group Director R2 Data Labs, Rolls Royce; John Thornhill, Innovation Editor, Financial Times; Dr Simon Beard, Academic Programme Manager and Senior Research Associate, Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, University of Cambridge; Dr Stephen Cave, Executive Director, Leverhulme Centre […]
The Whiteness of AI. Philos. Technol. (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-020-00415-6 Abstract: This paper focuses on the fact that AI is predominantly portrayed as white—in colour, ethnicity, or both. We first illustrate the prevalent Whiteness of real and imagined intelligent machines in four categories: humanoid robots, chatbots and virtual assistants, stock images of AI, and portrayals of AI in film […]
Always on my mind, CAM Magazine, Issue 91, Features. 23 November 2020 – 14 minute read. Words: Megan Welford. Illustration: Tim Enthoven What does it really mean for computers to be smarter than humans? We explore the singularity. Adrian Weller, Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal, Jess Whittlestone share their thoughts on AI ethics in this feature article from the […]
AI Narratives: A History of imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines PART I – ANTIQUITY TO MODERNITY 1: Homer’s Intelligent Machines: AI in Antiquity, Genevieve Liveley and Sam Thomas 2: Demons and Devices: Artificial and Augmented Intelligence before AI, E. R. Truitt 3: The Android of Albertus Magnus: A Legend of Artificial Being, Minsoo Kang and […]
We want to make cross-disciplinary research on the diversity of intelligences easier to navigate, by collecting and synthesising it in a single, accessible resource – an Atlas of Intelligences. Intelligence is found in a wide range of organisms and systems. We see it in everything from humans to hagfish, bacteria to bee colonies, and magpies […]
Applying intersectional and anthropological perspectives to designing AI for just and sustainable futures.
I believe that a technical field such as AI can contribute a great deal to our understanding of human existence, but only once it develops a much more flexible and reflexive relation to its own language and to the experience of research and life that this language organizes. Phil Agre, Towards a critical technical practice: […]
How we talk about new technologies and their risks and benefits can significantly influence their development, regulation, and place in public opinion. Balancing AI’s potential and its pitfalls therefore requires navigating this web of associations.
AI is set to have an unprecedented global impact -- and public perceptions will shape much of it, affecting how the technology is developed, adopted, and regulated. But different cultures see AI through very different lenses.
