Talks
Europe’s next chapter: how to unlock growth, steer innovation, and govern AI in a contested world
Europe is at a crossroads. Slower growth, geopolitical pressure, and rapid technological change are forcing hard choices. This panel event brings together Gabriel Attal, Gillian Tett, Lord Booth-Smith, and Menna Rawlings to debate Europe’s next chapter: how to boost competitiveness, govern AI credibly, and deliver reform at speed.
Original images by Zara Gounden, New York University. © Floudas & Gounden, 2025
From Servants to Successors: The Evitable Journey of Artificial Intelligence to Replace Humanity
Mon 24 November 2025
Downing College
Demetrius Floudas, Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence & I. Kant University
Monday 24 November 2025, 18:00 - 19:15
Wilkins Room, Downing College, University of Cambridge
We call these ubiquitous bots servants. What if in reality they are our heirs? If humanity is not the final form of intelligence, then are we merely the biological launchpad for our true successors, the AI we have created?
On one hand, we will investigate scenarios not of metallic armies, but of silent, systemic obsolescence. A world where AI is the new apex predator in the cognitive niche—where it not only writes all the essays for our supervisions and summarises that pesky library book that might take days to read; but also dispenses justice, proves the theorems, prescribes the cultural narrative and redefines how homo sapiens interacts in love, sex and death. In this future, humanity is not exterminated; it becomes simply... irrelevant.
On the other hand, the talk will explore the ultimate catastrophic risks: advanced AI systems surpassing human-level intelligence and evading their creators’ control for their incomprehensible (to us, at least) purposes. We will move beyond clichéd debates on 'alignment' and 'ethics' to present a provocative framework of outcomes for how this "evitable journey" can be, and must be, rerouted before the servants lock the door from the inside.
Further details at:
https://talks.cam.ac.uk/talk/index/240922
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The Speaker
Demetrius A. Floudas is a Visiting Scholar in Law at Downing College; Visiting Scholar at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence; Member of the AI@Cam (the University’s Artificial Intelligence Interdisciplinary Unit), Visiting Scholar in Law at Downing College; Senior Adviser to the Cambridge Existential Risk Initiative; and over the past months has been working on evaluating frameworks for algorithmic trading with the Judge Business School.
As Afl. Professor at Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University, he has been lecturing on ‘AI Regulation’ since 2022 - pre GPT- making him one of the first academics to design, curate and deliver an AI Law module…
Cost: Free
Enquiries and booking
Booking is recommended for this event.
This is an event organised by the Danby Scientific Society.
Enquiries: The Chair of the Danby Society Email: cw881@cam.ac.uk Telephone: 01223 334800