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My keynote at the 2021 Conference on Artificial Life

Last week I was really honoured to present a keynote talk at the 2021 Conference on Artificial Life, entitled Weird Tales: Early Visions of Machines That Can Reproduce and Evolve, and Their Relevance Today. The talk explored the early history of thinking about machines, robots and AI that can reproduce and evolve.

ALIFE 2021 keynote talk title slide

The content of the talk was based upon my book Rise of the Self-Replicators: Early Visions of Machines, AI and Robots That Can Reproduce and Evolve. The talk abstract is available on the conference website.

The conference organisers plan to post it publicly on YouTube in late August. I’ll announce when that happens. I am also thinking of posting a series of bitesize videos from it. Stay tuned for updates!