Decolonizing Artificial Intelligence

[Music]

or artificial intelligence is routinely

presented to us as a monolithic

technology

clean clear and game-changing people

talk about the era of ai

and ai-powered systems and worlds it

feels inescapable

a future that we are marching toward or

already in

so why would other stories about ai be

valuable or useful

well i believe that we need to tell

other stories about ai’s past

its present and even its future stories

that reveal other truths and other

possibilities

and make room for a more sustainable

safe and responsible ai

and ultimately a more human-centric one

so where would you start

well you’d start by looking at ai’s

founding moments

an attempt will be made to find how to

make machines use language

form abstractions and concepts solve

kinds of problems now reserved for

humans and improve themselves

those words frame a research proposal

written in 1955

to fund a two-month ten-man study at

dartmouth college the following summer

the authors came from elite american

organizations harvard

mit bell telephone labs ibm research

and they had diverse backgrounds and

interests and they had an ambitious

agenda to make machines think like

humans

the expectation was that computing

technology would continue along the

expansive trajectory established in the

late 1940s and 1950s

the participants imagined a vast array

of computational power and tremendous

possibility

and as a result they believe that much

of that initial research agenda could be

achieved within a decade

this was not to be but the important

thing to remember here is that ai isn’t

new

it’s not a 21st century thing we’ve been

talking about it since 1955.

and in fact whilst the term might have

been coined in 1955 the idea started

even earlier

from 1946 to 1953 the macy’s conference

has convened 10 meetings in new york

city and princeton

bringing together a range of thinkers

from across the disciplinary spectrum to

explore the ideas of the human

machine nature system they called this

cybernetics

curated in part by anthropologist

margaret mead and gregory bateson the

meetings were radically

interdisciplinary and represented an

attempt to constitute a whole new body

of academic knowledge

and a whole new discipline the attendees

are a remarkable role call of big

thinkers

shannon licklider von neumann mcculloch

ashby rosenbluthevena

they were inventing the future and many

of them would go on to be present again

in 1956 in person or in spirit

looking back on it 30 years later me

described it like this

in a sense it was the most interesting

conference i’d ever been in because no

one knew how to manage these things yet

ultimately cybernetics proved to be

contested territory and it was unduly

linked to forms of social engineering

that were unpalatable in 1950s america

and so it’s been conveniently forgotten

inside the ai

story of course there are lots of kinds

of forgetting and silences when it comes

to ai

for as much as we can forget that ai was

a term coined in 1955

we can also forget that the first

conference was funded by the rockefeller

foundation and had participation from

two of america’s biggest companies at

that time

ibm and bell telephone oh yeah and the

rand corporation with its very

complicated relationship to the united

states military was also an active

backer

in focusing just on the technological

piece of ai we sometimes miss the other

bits

where the resources came from why and

what interests were being served by them

we can also ignore that it’s not just

one ai but many built inside many

companies and governments and

non-governmental organizations

across the whole world in different

locations based on different data sets

and different constraints and even

manage through different frameworks and

regulations

and all those different ais they do

different kinds of work

some are about efficiencies and

productivities others are about safety

and control

and yet others are about surveillance

and desire

in 1956 the original ai proposal made

mention of ai and creativity

and the authors speculated about how ai

might make new artistic forms

but that speculation gave way quickly to

more conservative understandings of

intelligence

things about strategy reasoning and

language

yet a little more than 10 years after

dartmouth on the other side of the

atlantic

a remarkable woman installed her first

exhibit

she called it cybernetic serendipity and

it showcased work sitting at the ex

intersections of computing and art it

had music light poetry sculpture

all created with and through computers

jason reichardt was interested in the

ways that randomness would make

art and she imagined that computers

would surely play a part in that

one of the pieces exhibited there was

called return to a square

it was art created using fortran an

early programming language

it was created by a group of artists in

japan calling themselves the computer

technique group

and it was sponsored by ibm research in

japan

that group’s manifesto suggested a

completely different way of framing ai

one that was relational and involves

humans and society never just the

technology

in the manifesto they wrote as follows

we will tame the computer’s appealing

transcendental charm

and restrain it from serving established

power this stance is the way to solve

complicated problems in machine society

those are five stories about ai and they

certainly aren’t the usual ones

each represents a different way into ai

and opens up a different way of seeing

it and thinking about it

all its histories and its contexts the

examples i’ve used here help to reframe

ai and break down some of its powerful

story

we see histories and pre-histories and

silences and erasures we read against

the grain and listen to its hidden

stories

this approach is sometimes called

decolonization

this approach finds its shape in the

social sciences and builds on two really

simple ideas

number one the colonial act or another

act of a powerful force encountering the

world

shapes reality often through a violent

rearrangement of facts bodies and

cultural institutions

it’s also in decolonization possible to

read earlier states and alternative

possibilities inside that same reality

offering up a more complicated and

complicating story

for me decolonizing ai helps open up a

space for all those different kinds of

conversations

and how would such a conversation start

well it might start here

i want to acknowledge the traditional

owners of the land on which i am

standing this is not a wall in nambry

land

never seated always sacred and i pay my

respects to the elders past and present

of this place

i also acknowledge that we are gathering

in many places today and i pay my

respects to the local traditional owners

and elders of all those places too

it means a lot to me to get to say those

words and to dwell on what they mean and

what they signal

and to remember that we live in a

country that has been continuously

occupied for more than 60 000 years

aboriginal people built worlds they

built social systems

they built technologies they built a way

to manage this place and to manage it

remarkably over a protracted period of

time

and every time any one of us stands on a

stage as an australian

here or abroad we carry with us a

privilege and a responsibility because

of that history

and it’s not just a history it’s a

legacy of this place and it should run

through

all our bones and it should be the story

we always tell and the story we always

start with

and that’s a responsibility i take

really seriously and one that shapes all

the work i’m doing here in australia at

the australian national university

here on nanowall and nambry land we’re

building something new

we founded the 3a institute nearly

exactly three years ago

in september 2017 it has one deceptively

simple mission

to establish a new branch of engineering

to take ai safely sustainably and

responsibly to scale

so how do you build a new branch of

engineering in the 21st century

well we’re teaching into existence

through

experimental educational programs we’re

researching into existence with field

sites as diverse as shakespeare’s

birthplace and the great barrier reef

not to mention the world’s largest

autonomous mine and we’re theorizing it

into existence paying attention to the

complexities of cybernetic systems

we’re working to build something new and

something useful

and something that creates the next

generation of critical thinkers and

critical doers

we’re doing this through a richer

understanding of ai’s many past

and many stories and by working

collectively and collaboratively

by teaching and research and engagement

and by focusing as much on framing

questions as problem solving

we’re not building a single ai we’re

making the possibility for many

we’re actively working to decolonize our

imaginations and to build a curriculum

and a pedagogy

that leaves room for many different

conversations and possibilities

we’re making and remaking and i know

will always be a work in progress

[Music]

[Applause]

you