Science Futures Lecture: Cyberpunk Science

​In tensions between the collective and the individual, who can we rely on to drive the frontier of research?

​Why is it that in some scientific fields, an individual can make breakthrough discoveries with just a laptop and access to the internet, while in others you require whole teams with access to huge amounts of resource just to make marginal amounts progress?

​How do these dynamics change how science is carried out in these fields? What is lost when fields move between these paradigms, and how does this influence what research we choose to priortise next?

​Mahmoud Ghanem, the cyber misuse team lead at the UK government's AI Safety Institute, will explore these questions through the lens of cyberpunk speculative fiction, using variety of examples, including from his own experience working in cybersecurity and AI research.

​While Ghanem is currently employed as researcher, he identifies more as a technician than a scientist. He has spent most of his career building things, ranging from tools to help scientists run more experiments, to platforms that help detectives solve more crimes.

​His current job is building virtual environments which evaluate the risks caused by AI-enabled hackers. He does this in his role as head of the cyber research team at the AI Safety Institute, which is a research-focused directorate based out of the UK Government's Department of Science Innovation and Technology.

​Ghanem trained as an analytic philosopher and still occasionally blogs about topics related to moral progress, aesthetics and the philosophy of computation.