Stephen Cave is a philosopher, writer, and Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge. His work sits at the intersection of philosophy, religion, ethics, and technology, exploring humanity’s oldest questions about death, meaning, immortality, and what it means to live well in a rapidly changing world.

Before entering academia, Stephen worked as a diplomat for the British Foreign Office. He is an internationally recognised public philosopher whose research and writing examine how human beings confront mortality, and how emerging technologies, especially artificial intelligence, are reshaping those responses.

In this conversation, we explore why the awareness of death may be the defining feature of being human, and how our attempts to escape mortality continue to shape culture, religion, science, and modern technological ambition.

In This Episode We Explore:

• The evolutionary roots of the survival instinct paired with a uniquely human awareness of death
• Terror Management Theory and why immortality beliefs appear across cultures
• Religion, legacy, fame, and technology as competing “immortality stories”
• The wisdom tradition: gratitude for the sheer unlikeliness of being alive
• Serving others as an antidote to self-focused mortality anxiety
• Presence, mindfulness, and practices that reduce future-oriented fear
• Near-death experiences — and how naturalistic explanations can still preserve meaning
• Why living “forever” might collapse identity, values, and purpose
• Life-expectancy myths, real medical progress, and the limits of longevity optimism
• AI and biological technologies accelerating anti-ageing research
• Modern abundance alongside a growing crisis of meaning
• Population pressure, carrying capacity, and what it would take for longer lives to go well

Stephen Cave’s Books

• Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization
  A widely acclaimed philosophical exploration of humanity’s enduring attempts to overcome death.
• Should You Choose to Live Forever?
  A concise introduction to one of philosophy’s most provocative questions: would immortality actually be good for us?
• AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines (with Kanta Dihal)
  An exploration of how stories, myths, and cultural imagination shape our understanding of artificial intelligence.

Podcast Links:

www.examined-life.com

https://thisexaminedlife.substack.com/

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