Imagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines
Dr Kanta Dihal (University of Cambridge) discusses alternative visions of AI that disrupt the status quo of Western AI narratives.
Millennia-old dreams of intelligent machines have shaped the hopes, fears, and expectations for AI. Yet the most influential contemporary visions are shaped by a very narrow demographic: in the West, AI is a product of the white male imagination. Yet the Anglophone West is not the only place to ever have imagined the existence of intelligent machines. Different religious, linguistic, philosophical, literary and cinematic traditions have led to different conceptions of intelligent machines. This talk will discuss these alternatives that disrupt the status quo of Western AI narratives, with examples both from nations that lead in AI development and nations that have AI technologies and narratives imposed on them.
The master’s tools can never dismantle the master’s house, Audre Lorde famously claimed. Can we take this metaphor literally with regard to AI? In the Anglophone West, AI has been imagined as a tool produced by men to make women obsolete; as produced by the white elite to make their coloured servants obsolete. What the dominant discourse does not imagine is the dismantling of these hierarchies: the dismantling of the systems in which the majority of humanity is considered a tool. This talk will show that intelligent machines don’t have to be the master’s tools. The rest of the world has dreamt of them too.
Bio:
Dr Kanta Dihal is a Senior Research Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on science narratives, particularly those that emerge from conflict. She leads two research projects, Global AI Narratives and Decolonizing AI, in which she focuses on the portrayals and perceptions of artificial intelligence across cultures. She is co-editor of AI Narratives (Oxford, 2020) and has advised the World Economic Forum, the UK House of Lords, and the United Nations. She obtained her DPhil on the communication of quantum physics at Oxford in 2018.
