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For International Women’s Day (8 March), the Cambridge Festival (19 March – 4 April) is celebrating some of the remarkable contributions of women across diverse fields. From philosophy and music to AI and cosmology, the festival will highlight the pioneering work of women who have shaped our understanding of the world in profound ways.

We have a moral duty to allow others to make ‘transformative choices’ such as changing careers, migrating and having children, a new study argues. This duty can be outweighed by competing moral considerations such as preventing murder but in many cases we should interfere with far greater caution.

Nikhil Krishnan, winner of a 2021 Pilkington Prize for outstanding teaching, says that what he loves about teaching is what he loves about philosophy: you can’t know in advance where it’s going to lead. Outside of the lecture hall he’s unravelling how philosophy came to be what it is today.

Five Cambridge academics have been elected to the Fellowship of the British Academy in recognition of their contribution to the humanities and social sciences.

̽��ֱ��Royal Institute of Philosophy has awarded (jointly) its 2021 essay prize to a ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge researcher for the first philosophical analysis of ‘liking’ on social media. ̽��ֱ��essay, which focuses on Facebook, warns that ‘likes’ encourage communicative laziness while ‘like tallies’ fuel fake news, ‘gamify sociality’ and play to our psychological weaknesses.

Powerful AI needs to be reliably aligned with human values. Does this mean that AI will eventually have to police those values? Cambridge philosophers Huw Price and Karina Vold consider the trade-off between safety and autonomy in the era of superintelligence.

A bedside device that measures ‘brain signatures’ could help diagnose patients who have consciousness disorders – such as a vegetative state – to work out the best course of treatment and to support family counselling. 

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge is launching a new research centre, thanks to a £10 million grant from the Leverhulme Trust, to explore the opportunities and challenges to humanity from the development of artificial intelligence. 

A philosopher, a scientist and a software engineer have come together to propose a new centre at Cambridge to address developments in human technologies that might pose “extinction-level” risks to our species, from biotechnology to artificial intelligence.