Beth Singler is an anthropologist of artificial intelligence. She spoke about AI at Greenbelt Festival this summer, discussing being human in an AI age and the future of AI. She talked to Reform about what impact AI is already having, the hopes and fears of an AI future, and whether AI is God.

The interview was transcribed by AI and edited by humans

We’re all talking about AI these days, so we assume that we know what we mean by the term, but do we? What do you mean by AI?
It’s a very slippery term. It arrives in the 1950s, in a conference of cybernetic logisticians, mathematicians and people interested in the development of this technology. They come up with the term artificial intelligence, by which they mean being able to do any activity of thought that a human could do. They think they’re going to solve it in ten weeks over one summer, which is quite ambitious. There’s only ten of them!

Now it’s an umbrella term for lots of technologies and ideas that people have about potential futures. It covers a range between ‘Here’s a thing and how it actually works’, and ‘Here’s how we’re imagining it and telling stories about it.’ It’s influenced by science fiction, and by loud voices who have their own idea about what AI should be. So it’s very hard for people to understand what this thing is and how it works. The word AI gets attached to things that aren’t AI at all – as does the word robot…

___

This is an extract from an article published in the October 2024 edition of Reform

Subscribe to Reform