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.
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.
We will need an aggressive strategy to ensure the safety of agricultural yields and food in the future especially in drought- prone and even temperate zones.
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.
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.
There are large disparities in economic performance at the regional level in the UK. We need to consider what kinds of policies might raise regional performance and the extent which directed industrial policies and infrastructure spending might be employed to iron out differences.
There are green marketing scams, and dubious data being deployed to benefit shareholders. Are global businesses now leading politicians in moving towards more sustainable practice or is this an example of a ‘post-truth’ society?