Gresham College provides outstanding educational talks and videos for the public free of charge. There are over 2,500 videos available on our website. Your support will help us to encourage people's love of learning for many years to come.
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’.
Professor Wilks will describe the Semantic Web and its origin in annotation methods from the humanities and will argue the need for this form of AI to manage a lifetime’s information on the web.
2018 saw a seismic change in the willingness of women to speak out about sexual abuse. This lecture frankly confronts the anecdotal evidence and suggests ways in which we can learn from it.
Professor Wilks will discuss the notion of an artificial Companion, a long-term software agent that could be present in any device: a screen, handbag or even a furry toy - and which understands the person it 'lives' with.
The campaign to achieve the parliamentary vote for women (6 February 1918) took 52 years, from 1866 to 1918. During that time women and their male supporters employed both parliamentary and extra-parliamentary tactics, ranging from the presentation of petitions to the detonation of bombs.
The lecture will explore what we know (and don’t know) about sexual violence from a global perspective. How have people in different periods of history and in a variety of countries understood and responded to assaults?
Alan Turing famously proposed a test of artificial intelligence. What has been achieved? Stephen Hawking has said that real artificial intelligence will mean the end of mankind. Is that a real threat? Are there limits to what a silicon brain might do?
In the long run, in an Internet society, it is claimed, we will neither need nor want doctors, teachers, accountants, architects, the clergy, consultants, lawyers, and many others, to work as they did in the 20th century. - Is this true?