Cyril Birks

Research keywords: Cognitive Science, Causality, Possible Worlds, Moral & Epistemic Uncertainty, Moral Psychology & Philosophy

Bio:

Cyril holds a BA in Philosophy and a BPS-accredited MSc in Psychology from the University of St Andrews. He has served as Research Manager for the UKRI Policymakers’ Lab at the University of Warwick, as a Researcher in AI Ethics & Law at King’s College London, and as a Researcher in Geopolitics & Societal Resilience at the Cambridge AI Safety Hub. Beyond academia, he has worked as an investment strategist focused on emerging technologies, producing award-winning white papers and briefing institutional investors, C-suite leadership, and major global forums. Alongside his doctoral research, Cyril is an affiliate researcher with the Centre for Technomoral Futures and the ‘AI, Creativity, and the Human’ research cluster.

PhD research:

Cyril’s research asks how people and AI imagine what the world could look like and aim at the best outcomes when they can’t be certain. He asks, “How do natural and artificial intelligences represent possible futures, manage moral and epistemic uncertainty, and take (moral) action given that uncertainty?” By modelling those processes, Cyril hopes to help humans and AIs work together, effectively translate their values into beneficial action, manage uncertainty, and ultimately make wiser, kinder, decisions in an imperfect world.

Much more broadly Cyril is interested in research connected to the space of possible minds and substrate-neutral approaches to consciousness, memory, and future simulation; moral psychology; ergodicity and casual modelling in moral philosophy; computational models of virtue ethics; and human–AI collaboration – considering extended/scaffolded cognition and affective cognition.

Supervisors: Neil Bramley