About the lecture
For decades, popular culture has framed new technology, particularly artificial intelligence, as an existential threat. We have been promised autonomous machines ready to turn against their creators. Instead, AI systems are now embedded in everyday life to write emails, draw memes and help make decisions at scale.
They do not resemble killer robots, but they are reshaping how we experience information, authority and authenticity.
Professor Buckley’s Inaugural Lecture explores what this shift means for digital trust. If machines can imitate human expression, produce convincing misinformation and automate persuasion, how should we think about security? What happens when authenticity becomes difficult to verify and confidence becomes easier to manufacture? The reality is that facing an army of killer robots might be an easier problem to solve.
Drawing on research spanning insider threat, digital identity and generative AI, he argues that the central challenge of contemporary cyber security is not simply preventing technical breaches, but understanding how trust is formed, exploited and calibrated in digital environments.
Rather than focusing on dystopian futures, his lecture considers the everyday realities of AI-enabled systems and asks how we design technologies and societies that remain secure, resilient and worthy of trust.