The AI: Narratives and Justice Programme investigates the cultural contexts shaping how AI is perceived and developed, and the consequences for diversity, cognitive justice and social justice. The Programme brings together expertise from the humanities, the social sciences, and computer science in order to produce scholarly work that will inform future research – in academia, industry, business, and government – and encourage effective interventions to ensure AI is developed in ethical ways that are beneficial and just for all.
The Programme consists of two active projects. In collaboration with the Royal Society, the AI Narratives project explores how the fictional and non-fictional stories told about intelligent machines affect the research, reception and regulation of current technology, in the Anglophone West. The Global AI Narratives project (jointly funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation and DeepMind) extends this investigation globally in order to explore different regional narratives of artificial intelligence, how they impact on local debate, and how we might learn from them globally. Three further projects are in development: History of AI aims to historicise intelligent systems, and their politics, from antiquity to the present; AI and Gender aims to examine the ethical and social consequences of the relationship between gender and artificial intelligence; Decolonising AI aims to investigate and evidence the ways in which AI and its imaginaries can exacerbate, but also resolve, injustices based on racial and ethnic discrimination.
From Hephaestus’s golden servants to Karel Čapek’s Roboti, we have been imagining intelligent machines since long before we could build them. As artificial intelligence and robotics begin to fulfil their promise, they therefore arrive pre-loaded with meaning, sparking associations — and media attention — disproportionate to their capacities. This matters: how we talk about new […]
It is increasingly recognised that artificial intelligence has a gender and ethnicity problem. The first deployments of AI-related technologies have repeatedly shown that they perpetuate existing ethnic and racial biases. Famous cases include Google’s notorious tagging function which categorised a percentage of Black people as gorillas, along with Google’s follow-up ‘solution’ which was to remove the tag ‘gorilla’ from their […]
The History of AI project examines the complex historical factors — social, political, technological and otherwise — that have shaped the development of intelligent systems during both the twentieth century and prior. The project convenes a diverse network of leading scholars from around the globe to interrogate questions related to themes such as justice, labour, […]
The ‘Gender and AI’ research stream develops feminist and queer approaches to AI that are informed by critical race theory, postcolonial/decolonial theory, Asian American/Asian diaspora studies, crip theory, and areas of justice-oriented knowledge and work. While this project stream includes critical approaches to the state of women’s representation in the AI industry, it goes beyond […]
Understanding the socio-political implications of this technological revolution requires examining not only what we imagine drones can do, but how drones themselves function as an imaginary of society. Drones—pilotless or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)—have existed since the early twentieth century, but their presence became transformational in the twenty-first century, when they facilitated the surveillance and […]
Research Fellow (LCFI/University of Bonn) | Student Advisor
Project Leader / Chief Science Policy Officer, The Royal Society
Senior Research Fellow | Student Advisor
Student Fellow
Associate Teaching Professor (MSt) | Senior Research Fellow
Visitor and Associate Fellow
Senior Research Fellow | Student Advisor
Associate Director (Research Partnerships) | Senior Research Fellow
Director
