Search for "AI"
Participation at the core: AI, ELSI and community engagement
September 29, 2025
Alondra Nelson, a sociologist, STS scholar and expert on AI policy and ethics, recently published a letter in Science proposing that artificial intelligence (AI) should adopt the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications (ELSI) framework from genomics, an approach designed to put social concerns at the heart of technology governance. Nelson argues that meaningful community engagement …
AI winter and AI bubble: Historical and metaphorical reflections
I have followed the emergence of recent developments in AI from the end of 2022 onwards, marked by the launch of OpenAI‘s AI chatbot ChatGPT. It’s now the middle of 2025 and a LOT has happened in this space. From being a niche and nerdy topic, AI has become a topic discussed across society. Recently, I have observed …
Beauty and the snail
August 8, 2025
Since around 2016, the year I retired, I have followed the blossoming career of another University of Nottingham academic, Angus Davison, a professor of evolutionary genetics and expert on snails and a science communicator. He became famous in 2016 when he began to write and broadcast about ‘Jeremy the lonely lefty snail’, a snail with a …
Public engagement with AI: Some obstacles and paradoxes
June 13, 2025
I recently listened to a webinar by social scientists who had studied what AI researchers say about public reception of AI. The most important words I heard were ‘evidence’ (about public attitudes to and inclusion in AI) and ‘voices’ (of communities underrepresented in or negatively impacted by AI). The main argument was, I think, that …
Synthetic biology in the era of AI: From dominating nature to collaborating with it
January 17, 2025
Today’s post is a guest post by Christian Gude. He has a PhD in synthetic biology from the University of Nottingham (where we met when I was still doing synbio and RRI at the SBRC) and is now working at Phenotypeca Ltd as IP Analyst in a multidisciplinary role between science and intellectual property. In …
Playing with AI/Playing with fire
October 11, 2024
Since ChatGPT was released in November 2022, I have been fascinated by all new AIs that we can now ‘play’ with and that have made ‘artificial intelligence’ accessible to anybody who wants to give it a go. Remember the recipes for soup in the form of a Shakespearean sonnet or the Limericks on climate change …
Superintelligence: From the divine to the digital and back again
October 4, 2024
The word ‘superintelligence’ has been bandied about a bit recently, most prominently by Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, who said in a blog post on 23 September, 2024: “This may turn out to be the most consequential fact about all of history so far. It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a …
Mpox, again
August 19, 2024
On 14 August 2024 the WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared that an upsurge of mpox in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and a growing number of countries in Africa constituted a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC). This was the second time mpox had been declared a PHEIC. The last …