Connect
“Welcome to my website. I am the University of Salford’s Chair of Science Communication and Future Media, where I also direct our SciComm Space and am the academic lead for our Metaverse Special Interest Group and the ENGAGEMENT FORUM, which oversees our Community & Public Engagement. Beyond research and teaching, I advise global not-for-profits on areas related to my research on ethics and emerging technologies.
Here, you’ll find content from my talks, publications, industry engagement work and science communication activities. I’ve written 10 books, authored over 150 articles, given 350+ keynoted international events, and hosted global meetings on tech futures. Organizations often invite me to share what I think the future holds and I try to get that across by explaining what’s possible, what’s trending, and what’s valuable.”
Science
MY SCIENTIFIC EDUCATION BEGAN IN A SCHOOL OF SPORTS SCIENCES, where i majored in philosophy...
During this time, I was inspired to learn about all kinds of disciplines - psychology, biomechanics, anatomy, sociology, cultural studies, and philosophy. It was a real awakening for me, after having not been terribly studious at high school. Ethics and technology became my focus and I pursued fundamental questions about what it is to be human, what is a good life, and how science, medicine, and technology provoke new questions about our place in the world.
TECHnology
THE central THREAD IN MY RESEARCH IS making sense of TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE...
It seems to me that the single most important issue of our time is how we utilise technology for the better or worse of all life. As we enter a world of global catastrophic risk, autonomous vehicles, artificially intelligent machines, genetically enhanced lives, and metaverse mediated relationships are all rapidly changing the human condition and we need to answer complex questions that challenge who we think we are and our place in the world.
ETHICS
MY WRITING INVESTIGATES WHAT SORTS OF LIVES ARE WORTH LIVING...
and how the things we care about may be compromised or enriched by new technologies. I think of technology in a very broad sense, including the objects that we make, the ideas that we develop, and systems that underpin our use of things. We need smart solutions that allow the world to function as a whole and this alone makes it much harder to identify values, codes, and policies which can allow all societies can get behind.
ART & DESIGN
creativity is present in A LOT of my work, particularly as speculative design philosophy.
For many years, I was a Visiting Professor at the Royal College of Art and my earliest teaching examined the interface of art, technology, and the posthuman condition. From there, bioart became a key interest and focus for my theories on the future of creativity, and artistic practice is interwoven in my daily life through web design, photography, film making, and experimenting with new media platforms like 360 video, virtual reality and drones.
MEDIA change
how we live through media CHANGE HAS FASCINATED ME, as we become intertwined with digital worlds.
I've spent a considerable amount of my career studying media change, particularly how it affects our sense of identity, community, or professional conduct. The Olympic Games provide a regular outlet through which we can peek into the future of consumer media culture and, over the years, I have nurtured my own creative practice first as a writer, then as a photographer, and more recently as a film maker.
CULTURE
EVERYTHING I do IS DEEPLY EMBEDDED IN A CONCERN ABOUT socio-cultural change.
How humanity deals with change is at the core of my inquiries. Often, my route into a topic is through imagining the changes to our culture that are beginning to emerge as a result of some new set of circumstances, whether it is the possibility of cryonics, the rise of social media, or the creation of citizen science, the cultural impact of technology runs through all of my writing.