Stephen Cave

Professor Stephen Cave is Academic Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI) and Co-Director of the Institute for Technology and Humanity, both 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.

His research is mostly in the philosophy and ethics of technology, with two strands. First, he writes about the ethics of AI and robotics. His publications on this include the co-edited volumes AI Narratives (Oxford University Press, 2020), Imagining AI (Oxford University Press, 2023), and Feminist AI (Oxford University Press, 2023). 

Second, he writes about the ethics of life-extension and the philosophy of (im)mortality. His publications on this topic include Immortality (Crown, Penguin Random House, 2012), a New Scientist book of the year now available in many other languages, and Should You Choose To Live Forever? (with John Martin Fischer, Routledge, 2023).

His work has been covered in many hundreds of media outlets around the world, from The Atlantic to the Daily Mail. He has written on philosophical and scientific subjects for the Financial Times, Guardian, New York Times and others. He also regularly appears on television and radio, including the BBC and NPR