The 2026 Cosmos Lecture: Jack Clark on Human Autonomy

Apply for tickets to join us on May 20th at Oxford

Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic and a Founding Fellow of Cosmos, will deliver the 2026 Cosmos Lecture at the University of Oxford on Wednesday, May 20th.

His talk is titled “Change is inevitable. Autonomy is not” and will cover issues around how we live self-directed lives as AI becomes more integrated with them. The lecture is part of the annual lecture series we run with the University of Oxford’s Human-Centered AI Lab. The talk follows the inaugural Cosmos Lecture given at the end of 2024 by Turing Award winner Leslie Valiant on Educability, his computational theory of human uniqueness.

Jack’s preview of the lecture reads:

Change is inevitable. Autonomy is not.

AI has the potential to change societies and change how people think more than any technology ever created by people. The enormity of these changes and how to situate ourselves in reference to it often forces us to reach for visions of the future that range from the enchanting to the apocalyptic. But the greatest challenge in front of us will be to choose how to maintain and enhance our mental autonomy in an age of powerful synthetic intelligences.

In this talk, I’ll discuss the changes to come in the years ahead from the development of more powerful systems and how we can prepare ourselves to maintain sovereignty as systems become more powerful.

Jack is a co-founder of Anthropic. As Head of Public Benefit, he leads the Anthropic Institute – the company’s new research division on the societal consequences of advanced AI. He has also been writing Import AI since 2016, a weekly newsletter on AI research and its implications, read by over 120,000 people and many frontier AI researchers.

The talk will be followed by a fireside chat between Jack and Cosmos founder Brendan McCord, with a philosopher response from Professor Philipp Koralus (HAI Lab Director) and audience Q&A.

Details

Time: 3 - 4:30pm, Wednesday, May 20th

Location: Sohmen Concert Hall, Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities

While the majority of the tickets are reserved for members of the university community, we have a limited number of slots set aside for people interested in, thinking about, and/or researching these issues in our network.

If you’re able to come to Oxford and are keen to attend the lecture, please fill out this short form as soon as you can. We’ll be in touch by Tuesday May 5th if we can accommodate you.

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Cosmos Institute is the Academy for Philosopher-Builders, technologists building AI for human flourishing. We run fellowships, fund AI prototypes, and host seminars with institutions like Oxford, Aspen Institute, and Liberty Fund.