Reflections, publications and talks on performance, technology and impact.
From ELIZA to GPT: How the uncanny shaped human-AI interaction's hidden history
In 1961, researchers at Bell Labs programmed the IBM 7094 to sing 'Daisy Bell'. The voice was synthesised, mechanical and deeply strange: almost human, but not quite. It was uncanny – that unsettled feeling we get when something is almost, but not quite, human.
Why AI training fails when meaningful voices aren’t in the room
At the 2025 AI Summit London's medicine panel in June, Patty O'Callaghan of Charles River Laboratories discussed the trust deficit with doctors working with AI outputs. Many medical professionals are resistent to working with LLMs not because the technology isn't sophisticated or can't add value, but often because they've read about hallucinations in the news and nobody's taken the time to explain how these tools actually work, when they're reliable and when they're not. These aren't technology failures, but failures of imagination about who needs to be in the room when we design AI training.
Two days at AI Summit London
AI Summit London revealed an industry in transition, moving from experimental enthusiasm to the messier realities of implementation, ethics and what it means to integrate new technologies without re-entrenching existing systems of power. Across the stages and sessions, the conversations kept circling back to the same fundamental challenges: how do we move beyond pilot projects to meaningful organisational change, and what does genuine human engagement with AI actually look like?
The question before the tools: What 20 years of research leadership reveals about AI strategy
In 2015, I found myself in a room with a pathologist, a disability historian, medical students and theatre artists, all staring at the same problem from completely different angles. We were exploring the case of Tarrare, an 18th-century French medical anomaly (he couldn’t stop eating) who died convinced that a golden fork lodged in his stomach was killing him. When his doctor performed the autopsy, no golden fork was ever found.