This is Election, the weekly Cambridge politics podcast, which tackles the biggest questions from new angles. Last season it asked the questions no-one else did in the run up to the UK's General Election: in Season II, it's going international. 

From January until April, Election will look at the US Presidential election and other elections around the world, exploring the current state of democracy and the many challenges it faces in 2016. 

It will continue to take the temperature of British politics, after last year's remarkable election and the even more remarkable events that followed. Can Corbyn hold the Labour Party together? Will Britain be leaving the EU? Where is opposition to the government going to come from? 

With David Runciman, Helen Thompson, Finbarr Livesey and Chris Brooke, plus new voices and a new series of guests, Election promises insights from the worlds of science, history, philosophy and beyond. 

A new episode every Thursday morning: please join us for the most interesting politics conversation out there.

http://www.cam.ac.uk/election


ELECTION

cambridge

What can we learn from the ancient Romans and Greeks about the impact of migration on language and how is this relevant to contemporary concerns about immigration and language change?

Migration and language: ancient perspectives by Dr James Clackson

Dr Esther-Miriam Wagner. The way we speak and write is a major part of our identity. We will explore what dialects tell us about our social networks, whether alphabets really mean anything, and why youth speak is not all that terrible.

How language shapes our identity by Dr Esther-Miriam Wagner

From the University of Cambridge comes ELECTION, our weekly Politics Podcast; asking the questions that no one else is in the run-up to the British General Election with the greatest minds inside and outside the political arena. 

Can democracy adapt to our strained political system? Who (if anyone) will ‘win’ in 2015? What can the lessons of the past teach us about the future? 

Professor David Runciman interviews and puts these questions to philosophers, historians, scientists, and political thinkers – with enlightening results – in a weekly podcast series coming from his office in the Department of Politics and International Studies. 

More information at http://www.cam.ac.uk/election

S01-EP10- Barbara Sahakian on psychology, politics & well-being

S01-EP06 - Rae Langton on Charlie Hebdo, free speech vs hate speech & blasphemy

S01-EP05 - Clare Jackson on the United Kingdom, Scotland & the politics of memory

S01-EP04 - John Naughton on Facebook in Politics, Edward Snowden, & Surveillance

S01-EP03 - Martin Jacques on the global perspective, Britain’s decline, & China’s rise

S01-EP02 - Martin Rees on surviving this century, scientists in politics, and 2015

S01-EP01 - Maurice Glasman on democracy, creative destruction and Wolf Hall

In 2003 Jenny Clay Strauss, daughter of the German Jewish historian of political philosophy Leo Strauss and herself a professor of classics, wrote to the New York Times to protest articles that presented her father “as the mastermind behind the neoconservative ideologues who control United States foreign policy.” She went on: “He reaches out from his 30-year-old grave, we are told, to direct a "cabal" (a word with distinct anti-Semitic overtones) of Bush administration figures hoping to subject the American people to rule by a ruthless elite.” In “A Cabal We Deserve: Leo Strauss, the Straussians, and Public Intellectual Culture,” Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft explores the meanings of conspiracy theories surrounding Leo Strauss and the Straussians. What values of transparency in democratic governance, what attitudes towards lying in politics, animate them? What ideas about conservative as opposed to progressive intellectuals? And what expectations for public intellectual life in a democratic society are bound up with all this talk of conspiracy? 

Leo Strauss and Public Intellectual Culture

Human-level (“general”) AI is more difficult to achieve than most people think. One key obstacle is relevance, a conceptual version of the frame problem. Another is lack of the semantic web. Yet another is the difficulty of computer vision. So artificial general intelligence (AGI) isn’t on the horizon. Possibly, it may never be achieved. No AGI means no Singularity.

Even so, there’s already plenty to worry about—and future AI advances will add more. Areas of concern include unemployment, computer companions, and autonomous robots (some, military). Worries about the (illusory) Singularity have had the good effect of waking up the AI community (and others) to these dangers. At last, they are being taken seriously.

Professor Margaret Boden is a world-leading academic in the study of intelligence, both artificial and otherwise. She is is Research Professor of Cognitive Science at the Department of informatics at the University of Sussex, where her work embraces the fields of artificial intelligence, psychology, philosophy, cognitive and computer science. She was the founding-Dean of Sussex University’s School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, a pioneering centre for research into intelligence and the mechanisms underlying it — in humans, other animals, or machines. The School’s teaching and research involves an unusual combination of the humanities, science, and technology.

Professor Boden has also been an important participant in the recent international discussions over the long-term impacts of AI. She was a member of the AAAI’s 08/09 Presidential Panel on long-term AI futures (http://www.aaai.org/Organization/presidential-panel.php), and also took part in the recent Puerto Rico conference on the Future of AI, co-organised by CSER (http://futureoflife.org/misc/ai_conference); she is therefore uniquely well-placed to discuss near- and long-term prospects in AI. 