Stephen Cave

Biography

Stephen Cave is Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, Senior Research Associate in the Faculty of Philosophy, and Fellow of Hughes Hall, all at the University of Cambridge.

Stephen earned a PhD in philosophy from Cambridge. He then joined the British Foreign Office, where he served for nearly a decade as a policy advisor and diplomat before returning to writing and academia. He now holds the grade of Director of Research at the University of Cambridge (full professor equivalent).

His research is mostly in the philosophy of technology, with two strands. First, he writes about the ethics of AI and robotics. His publications on this include the volumes AI Narratives (Oxford University Press, 2020), Imagining AI (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2023), and Feminist AI (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2023). Second, he writes about the ethics of life-extension and the philosophy of (im)mortality. His publications on this topic include Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How it Drives Civilization (Crown, Penguin Random House, 2012), a New Scientist book of the year now available in many other languages, and Should We Want To Live Forever (Routledge, forthcoming 2022).

He has also written and spoken on a wide range of philosophical and scientific subjects, including in the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and on television and radio around the world.