Adam Lalák

I grew up in the cultural environment of Prague. I studied at grammar school Nad Alejí, but at the age of 17 I was lucky enough to receive the HMC Scholarship to complete my A-levels at Loretto School in Edinburgh. I studied history, politics and physics. My stay at this boarding school was a very special adventure for me. In 2012 I started studying philosophy at the University of Cambridge. As an undergraduate, I became interested in the problems of mind, language and the scientific method, eventually transferring to the study of natural science, which enabled me to study cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics and neuroscience. During my Masters, completed again in Cambridge with the support of Bakala Foundation, I specialized in the philosophical and theoretical questions in cognitive science and evolutionary biology. My Masters thesis was concerned with the new directions in the study of mental phenomena through the analysis of the human body. I also become more interested in the problems of artificial intelligence. Besides my studies, I taught logic to undergraduates. I also worked with the Czech company Scio on a project concerning the teaching of logic at the primary level; this was one of the many manifestations of my live-long interest in education in the Czech Republic. I also wrote a number of essays on society and politics. My essay on the relation between postmodernism and post-truth society published in Lidové Noviny in 2016 stirred a considerable debate. After finishing my studies, I initially worked at The Institute of Art and Ideas in London, a company concerned with the public understanding of science and philosophy. Currently, I work as a futurist in the corporate think tank McCann Truth Central, where I manage a research project on the future of Europe. I my research, I combine sociological, anthropological and philosophical approaches to forecast the impact of technology and artificial intelligence on society, politics and business. I also work with the Czecho-Slovak summer academy Discover, where I will be teaching a course in philosophy of the future in 2018. In my free time I like to write and draw.