By slide number as presented at Greenwich Skeptics, 2026-04-13:
3 – Ofcom, Adults’ Media Use and Attitudes Report, April 2, 2026.
4 – What is “AI”? Clockwise from top left: Eliza (1966), by Joseph Weizenbaum, which simulated a psychotherapist; a modern data center; Sidney Harris’s 1977 cartoon, “Then a miracle occurs”; protein folding by DeepMind’s Alphafold in 2024; Privacy International‘s mockup of an AI-assisted surveillance dashboard.
6 – Automata: Ancient Greek automata; mechanical singing birds and other musical machines.
7 – Companions, clockwise from top left: Wilson, Tom Hanks’ basketball in the 2000 movie Cast Away; a Roomba (2002); C3PO and R2D2 from Star Wars; Furbys (1998); a Tamagotchi pet (1996).
9 – Helpers: Mickey Mouse’s enchanted broom in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” from the 1940 movie Fantasia; Rosey the Robot in the 1962 TV series The Jetsons.
10 – Guardians: a Golem; a guardian angel; HAL, from the 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.
11 – Killers: The Price of Privacy: Re-evaluating the NSA, 2014; the Terminator; IEEE Spectrum.
12 – Frauds: The Mechanical Turk; automata by Jacques de Vauconson; Clever Hans.
13 – Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, formulated in his first robot short story, “Runaround”, in 1942.
14 – Arthur C. Clarke’s three laws, first formulated in “The Hazards of Prophecy” in 1962, revised in 1973.
15 – Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, 1950.
16 – The Turing test, from “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”.
17 – The Unperson of the Year by James Boyle at TechDirt.
18 – The eight scientists who assembled in Dartmouth for the first workshop on artificial intelligence in 1956: Oliver Selfridge, Nathaniel Rochester, Ray Solomonoff, Marvin Minsky, Trenchard More, John McCarthy, and Claude Shannon.
19 – Personal conversation with John McCarthy, 2006.
20 – Your A.I. Radiologist Will Not Be With You Soon by Steve Lohr at the New York Times”; Ed Zitron.
23 – Demis Hassabis, quoted in the Guardian as DeepMind’s mission at its founding in 2010.
24 – Ken MacLeod, The Cassini Division, 1998.
25 – Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, 2014.
26 – Charles Stross, Dude, You Broke the Future, 2017.
27 – Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”.
28 – Games: chess, Jeopardy, Go (2016).
29 – Clockwise from top left: protesters freeze a Cruise robotaxi by placing a traffic cone on its hood; Microsoft services agreement; BBC; Nature; Hacker Noon; Red Dog Security; Waymos Freeze in Place, Snarl Traffic En Masse During Saturday’s Citywide Power Outage; The Register.
30 – Cory Doctorow, at Pluralistic.
31 – 404 Media
32 – Books: Ghost Work, by Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri (2019); Behind the Screen, by Sarah T. Roberts (2019); The Costs of Connection, by Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Meijas (2020); Atlas of AI, by Kate Crawford (2021).
33 – Books: Automating Inequality, by Virginia Eubanks (2019); Black Software, by Charlton R. McIlwain (2019); Unmasking AI, by Joy Buolamwini (2023); Algorithms of Oppression: Why Search Engines Reinforce Racism, by Safia Umoja Noble (2018).
34 – Chart showing the flow of money in the LLM ecosystem. Drawn by Edward Hasbrouck for the (US) National Writers Union.
35 – Good ongoing coverage of behind-the-scenes human workers at Rest of World.
36 – 1X’s Neo robot home servant, launched 2025.
38 – London’s Ringways: The first map of the capital’s unbuilt motorways.
39 – Ringways.
41 – Exponential future: Ray Kurzweil’s projection of the “law of accelerating returns”; Mickey Mouse drowns in exponential growth in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” in Fantasia, 1940.
42 – Turbli.
43 – Present harm, clockwise from top left: Kings College London; Ars Technica; Bureau of Investigative Journalism; Anadolu Ajansi; Toronto Star; NBC News; Guardian.
44 – Madeleine Claire Elish, Moral Crumple Zones: Cautionary Tales in Human-Robot Interaction (2019).
45 – Hildebrandt, Mireille, keynote at Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection 2025.
46 – Replace by Clawd.
Further reading:
Becker, Adam, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity (2025).
Bender, Emily M., and Alex Hanna, The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want, 2025.
Booth, Robert, at the Guardian: Number of AI chatbots ignoring human instructions increasing, study says.
Broussard, Meredith, Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World (2018) and More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and the Ability Bias in Tech (2024).
Couldry, Nick, and Ulises A. Meijas, Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech (and How to Fight Back, 2024.
Darling, Kate, The New Breed, 2021.
Grossman, Wendy M., Finding the gorilla.
Jones, Phil, Work Without the Worker (2021).
Marx, Paris, the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast.
O’Neil, Cathy, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (2017).
Shane, Janelle M., You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It’s Making the World a Weirder Place (2019).
Standage, Tom, The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine (2003)
Strengers, Yolanda, and Jenny Kennedy, The Smart Wife (2020).
Stross, Charles, Shaping the Future, 2007.