Long Now Genevieve Bell: The 4th Industrial Revolution: Responsible & Secure AI
Aug 28, 2020
Genevieve Bell, an Australian anthropologist and leader of the 3A Institute, delves into the intersection of AI and culture. She emphasizes the need for responsible, sustainable AI development, drawing lessons from Indigenous engineering practices. Bell discusses the historical context of the industrial revolutions, urging proactive design for future cyber-physical systems. She highlights the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration and the cultural diversity needed in AI, while questioning its impact on our understanding of intelligence and societal structures.
AI Snips
Chapters
Books
Transcript
Episode notes
Ancient Enduring Engineering
- Genevieve Bell describes the 40,000-year-old Barwon fish-trap system as a durable technical-social-ecological engineering achievement.
- She uses it to show ancient engineering combined technology, culture, and environment to sustain communities over millennia.
Framing The Fourth Wave
- The World Economic Forum framed the 'fourth industrial revolution' as part of a historical sequence of industrial waves.
- Bell argues that framing often overemphasizes technology and underplays social and cultural consequences.
Scale Requires Social Machinery
- Each prior industrial revolution required time, regulation, new roles and infrastructure to reach scale.
- Bell uses steam and railways to show scale emerges from many social practices, not just invention alone.
