Cambridge Skeptics

We talk about “artificial intelligence” as if it were a single thing, but in reality it’s an umbrella term that can mean anything from a computer program that generates an image from a prompt composed of a few words or automates keeping meetings notes to a non-biological superhuman consciousness to which we seem as dumb as a computer program that prints “Hello, world” seems to us. The issue is exacerbated by a number of factors: the hype “AI” companies’ marketing people sprinkle on everything; the depictions in science fiction books, movies, and TV shows; and, not least, our eternal desire for companions and superhuman guardians and our ability to anthropomorphize absolutely anything. This talk will tease apart some of these threads, and provide some guidelines in deciding how to navigate the difference between the state of the art and fantasy.

Wendy M. Grossman is the founder and former editor of The Skeptic magazine. For 35 years, she has focused on computers, freedom, and privacy in books and for publications such as the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, New Scientist, Scientific American, and Wired. Since 2001 she has published a weekly blog, net.wars. She is also a sometimes folksinger.

A hundred years ago, whooping cough killed more than one in every hundred children born in Europe. Eighty years ago, two women in Grand Rapids, Michigan, developed the vaccine that stopped it. All it took was years of working evenings and weekends, an army of volunteer healthcare workers and lab technicians funded by donations from local businesses. Fifty years ago, their whooping cough vaccine was at the centre of a scare that ushered in the modern antivaccine movement. The story of the whooping cough vaccine is a story of good science, bad science and of the limitations of science when applied to anything as complicated as human beings.

David Miles is an infectious disease immunologist who spent ten years researching immunity to infections and the vaccinations that protect against them in various parts of Africa. He now lives in London and teaches on the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s online postgraduate course. His first popular science book, How Vaccines Work, was published in March 2023 and his second, Sneeze: The History and Science of the Common Cold, was published in March 2026.