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The Brothers Grimm’s tale of Snow White has been retold dozens of times in print and the cinema over the past two centuries. A central character is the Evil Queen, Snow White’s malevolent stepmother, who tries to kill her with the help of the occult.
Air pollution, the usefulness of trees, ideas for a green belt are not concerns we associate with the 1600s. But John Evelyn, writer, diarist and gardener, was unusual. His thinking in Fumifugium (1661) about air quality, and Sylva (1664) about trees, seems astonishingly close to our own today.
How does fiction make itself seem like fact? Professor John Mullan begins where novels begin: with Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, which showed every novel that followed how to make a ‘strange surprising’ story seem entirely ‘probable’ (the word that eighteenth-century pioneers of fiction liked t
London in the 1950s and 60s was a crucible in which West Indian writers, artists, thinkers and scholars imagined new futures for the Caribbean, Britain and the world.
Algorithms, loosely translated, are systems for doing things. Algorithms are thus the link from pre-history to the modern world – without algorithms we would have an inanimate universe without all the mess and complexity of real life. It turns out that the history of algorithms is messy.
From The Merchant of Venice to The Taming of the Shrew, it’s easy to see how Shakespeare’s plays can cause offence to contemporary audiences. Is it harder to teach Shakespeare today than in the past? Have ideas about what is offensive in Shakespeare changed over time?
What are the opportunities for using Information Technology to reduce the cost of healthcare? And what might our healthcare system look like in 10 years time if we make judicious investments in technology?
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.