Dr Kathleen Richardson is Departmental Research Associate at the Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University. She has written on how humans relate to robots and was a visiting researcher at the Humanoid Robotics Lab, MIT, Boston. Dr. Blay Whitby is a lecturer at Sussex University and the author of several books including Artificial Intelligence: A beginner’s Guide, and he works on the ethics of robotics. A recent talk of his was called Do you want a robot lover?

The day The Brighton Salon met to discuss the financial crisis that has seen banks and markets collapse globally and recession set in, British political parties were arguing about fiddling with taxes after the chancellor’s pre-budget report.

TV journalists have been scraping the bottom of the metaphorical barrel of analogies while newspapers have splattered their coverage with increasingly lurid graphics (The Guardian’s colourful blobs take my award for making simple figures particularly uninformative).