“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