Beyond Artificial Intelligence: examining the importance of technical, cultural and ecological systems

We’ve been focusing a lot recently on artificial intelligence and the broad applications and implications of its growing presence and effects on our lives.  So we have invited Professor Bell to provide some background on Artificial Intelligence, the conversations in which it was imagined and their enduring consequences for our current world.

Professor Genevieve Bell brings an international and multidisciplinary perspective on the impact of AI, data and technology on humanity.

Professor Bell is a renowned anthropologist, technologist, and futurist, who spent more than two decades in Silicon Valley helping guide Intel’s product development and social science and design research capabilities – at a very practical level, the human-machine interface.  She is best known for her work at the intersection of cultural practice and technology development and for being an important voice in the global debates around artificial intelligence and human society. 

Professor Bell worked with Intel Corporation to pioneer futurist research.  She and her colleagues helped re-orient Intel to a more market-inspired and experience-driven approach and she is widely credited with establishing User Experience as a recognised competency at Intel, working on questions of big data, smart transportation, next generation image technology and ideas about fear and wonder.

In 2017 she returned to Australia as Director of the School of Cybernetics, at ANU. She is also Director of the Autonomy, Agency and Assurance (3A) Institute, an ANU-CSIRO Data 61 collaborative Institute with the mission of building a new branch of engineering to safely, sustainably and responsibly scale AI-enabled cyber-physical systems. 

Genevieve Bell gave the 2017 Boyer Lectures on the human experience in a digital future (https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/boyerlectures/2017-boyer-lectures/8869370).

If you want to know how we humans will interact with and manage AI, this is an event you will not want to miss, so please join us for a fascinating discussion.