Genevieve Bell on bringing more people into the AI conversation

“The usual things in the AI conversation are missing that are missing from many conversations about technology. One is an awareness of history. I think, like I said, AI doesn’t come out of nowhere. It came out of a very particular set of preoccupations and concerns in the 1950s and a very particular set of conversations. We have, in some ways, erased that history such that we forget how it came to be. For me, I think a sense of history is missing. As a result of that, I think more attention to a robust interdisciplinarity is missing, too. If we’re talking about a technology that is as potentially pervasive as this one and as potentially close to us as human beings, I want more philosophers and psychologists and poets and artists and politicians and anthropologists and social scientists and critics of art, I want them all in that conversation because I think they’re all part of it.

“I worry that this just becomes a conversation of technologists to each other about speeds and feeds and their latest instantiation as opposed to saying if we really are imagining a form of an object that will be in dialogue with us and supplemental and replacing us in some places, I want more people in that conversation.”—Genevieve Bell

Related:

• The CFP for the O’Reilly AI Conference in New York, June 26-29, 2017, is open through January 18, 2017.
• Compilation of keynotes and sessions from the O’Reilly AI Conference in New York, 2016
• What is artificial intelligence?, by Mike Loukides and Ben Lorica
• Hilary Mason on the impact of AI technologies