Beth Victoria Lois Singler, born Beth Victoria White, is a British anthropologist specialising in artificial intelligence. She is known for her digital ethnographic research on the impact of apocalyptic stories on the conception of AI and robots, her comments on the societal implications of AI, as well as her public engagement work. The latter includes a series of four documentaries on whether robots could feel pain, human-robot companionship, AI ethics, and AI consciousness. She is currently the Junior Research Fellow in Artificial Intelligence at

Homerton College Homerton College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Its first premises were acquired in Homerton, London in 1768, by an informal gathering of Protestant dissenters with origins in the seventeenth century. In 1894, the co ...

University of Cambridge , mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts. Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge. , established = , other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...

Education

Singler completed an undergraduate degree in Theology and Religious Studies at the

, focusing on religious studies and the sociology and anthropology of religion. After graduating, she spent nine years working in London as a freelance scriptwriter and developer, which included completing a postgraduate diploma in Script Development with the National Film and Television School in 2007. Singler returned to Cambridge in 2010 to begin an MPhil in Theology and Religious Studies, completing a master’s thesis on the religious interpretations of anorexia amongst the Pro-Ana Movement. Her subsequent PhD thesis was the first

ethnography Ethnography (from Greek ''ethnos'' "folk, people, nation" and ''grapho'' "I write") is a branch of anthropology and the systematic study of individual cultures. Ethnography explores cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject o ...

of the

Indigo Children Indigo children, according to a pseudoscientific New Age concept, are children who are believed to possess special, unusual, and sometimes supernatural traits or abilities. The idea is based on concepts developed in the 1970s by Nancy Ann Tappe, ...

, a

New Age New Age is a range of spiritual or religious practices and beliefs which rapidly grew in Western society during the early 1970s. Its highly eclectic and unsystematic structure makes a precise definition difficult. Although many scholars conside ...

idea with online communities and discourse. Her thesis was published as a monograph in 2017, as ''The Indigo Children: New Age Experimentation with Self and Science''.

Academic career

In 2016, Singler joined the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion ( St Edmund's College, University of Cambridge) as a post-doctoral research associate on the ‘Human Identity in the Age of Nearly Human Machines’ project on the implications of AI on our understanding of what it means to be. She embarked on a film making project with DragonLight Films, producing four short documentaries over the next two years. The first , Pain in the Machine, won the Best Research Film of the Year award from the AHRC’s Research in Film Awards in 2017. She was made an associate fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence in 2016. She was a founding member of the AI Narratives research project with the LCFI and the

Royal Society The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...

, which led to a Royal Society report in 2018. She was one of the Co-Principal Investigators for the Global AI Narratives project, funded by the Templeton World Charitable Foundation and Google DeepMind, until 2019. In 2018 she was appointed Junior Research Fellow in Artificial Intelligence at Homerton College, University of Cambridge. She was a member of the UK Advisory Board for “Citizenship in the Digital Age”, a Templeton project. She co-chaired the advisory committee for the Royal Society for the Arts/Google DeepMind Forum on Ethical AI. She was one of the speakers in the Hay Festival’s Cambridge Series in 2017, as well as being one of the ‘Hay 30’, as a part of the festival’s 30th anniversary celebrations. Sections of her talk have been used in a Hay Festival podcast, alongside Ian McEwan, Garry Kasparov, Stephen Fry, and Marcus De Sautoy.

Publications

Books

*''The Indigo Children: New Age Experimentation with Self and Science'', 2019 Routledge

Selected papers

* “Blessed by the Algorithm”: Theistic Conceptions of Artificial Intelligence as Entanglements of AI and Religion (2020) * The AI Creation Meme: A Case Study of the New Visibility of Religion in Artificial Intelligence Discourse (2020) * Artificial Intelligence and the Parent/Child Narrative (2020) * Conceiving AI: Creation and the Parent/Child Narrative in Blade Runner 2049 (2019) * An Ethnographic Discussion of Existential Hope and Despair in AI Apocalypticism (2019) * An Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and Religion for the Religious Studies Scholar (2018) * Roko’s Basilisk or Pascal’s? Thinking of Singularity Thought Experiments as Implicit Religion (2018)

Personal life

Beth Singler lives in Cambridge with her husband and son . An article she wrote for Aeon magazine in 2018 speculated on the benefits of teaching AI to play Dungeons and Dragons.

References

External links

BVLSingler.comHomerton college profile
{{DEFAULTSORT:Singler, Beth Year of birth missing (living people) Living people British anthropologists British women anthropologists British ethnographers Fellows of Homerton College, Cambridge Alumni of the University of Cambridge