So: a lifetime of missing the mark, going astray, stumbling, fumbling, stuffing up, and overcooking it finally pays off – along with economist Séverine Toussaert and digital studies scholar David De Roure, I’m on the panel for the final TORCH Talk of the academic year at the University of Oxford, taking an interdisciplinary look at failure.
Come join us at the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, 12.30pm-1.30pm on Wednesday, 10th June.
Alongside my other duties, I’m pleased to take on a new role leading the project “Death, dying, and afterlife in the age of AI” at Oxford University – a collaboration between the Uehiro Oxford Institute and TORCH – The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities.
Emerging capabilities in artificial intelligence create the possibility of new relationships between the living and the dead.
After physical decease, what digital entities might live on in our stead? What agency will they have? How will the underlying technologies be developed, deployed, and managed? How will identity be authenticated?
What will be the impact on how individuals, families, communities, and societies approach the end of life, its associated rituals, and the ways in which we remember those who are gone?
Our team will use scenario planning to explore these questions and more, envisaging different future contexts for the relationship between AI and the afterlife, encompassing all aspects of memorial culture, funerary practices, and posthumous existence in the digital world.
One of my contributions to the 2025 Global Youth Climate Summit, hosted by the University of Oxford, has just gone online at the Oxford Climate Change Challenge site.
In the newly-released talk “Navigating the sea of uncertainty: challenging assumptions about what the future holds“, we consider ways to address times of turbulence, when the context in which we operate seems to be unsteady and unpredictable.
You can also see a previously released talk from the same event, “The black box of action: how to make your climate project count“, at the same site.
matt finch / mechanical dolphin 