Vanessa Toholka, Gavin McIntyre and Brian Pickles at the Wheeler Centre

Mushrooms, it seems, have some uncanny properties. Fungi are more closely related to humans than plants, and if we can work with our fungal cousins, we might find a way to reduce waste – and perhaps even salvage our planet.

Gavin McIntyre and Brian Pickles are two ‘bio-neers’ whose work is at the forefront of the new mushroom movement. McIntyre is co-founder and chief scientist at the New York-based biofabrication company, Ecovative, where he’s developing fungal mycelium products to replace plastics, wood, leather and even bricks. Pickles is an ecologist at the University of Reading and part of a pioneering research team that is unlocking the secrets of the mysterious symbiotic system known as mycorrhiza. He has found that trees can communicate, thanks to underground mushroom networks, which connect trees at their roots.

At the Wheeler Centre, Vanessa Toholka joins McIntyre and Pickles to discuss the implications of their discoveries and inventions, as they make the case for a fungal future.

Vanessa Toholka and Kate Devlin at the Wheeler Centre

Sex robots are an endless source of anxiety, titillation, humour and fascination in popular culture – from Westworld to the novels of Philip K Dick to the fembots in Austin Powers. But what does the real future of sex and artificial intelligence look like? And how will we navigate the ethical questions (and erotic possibilities!) of intimacy with androids?

Kate Devlin is a London-based computer scientist and a leading voice in sex robots research. She’s also the author of an insightful, optimistic and witty new book on the subject, Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots. In this conversation with Vanessa Toholka, she talks through the philosophical and legal implications of emerging sex technologies – and discuss both the alarming and positive breakthroughs in the field. We need to ‘think outside the bots,’ Devlin has written, and focus more on the future of multi-sensory virtual experiences.