In this LSE Impact Blog, Sarah summarises the highlights of her research into the impact of the leisure reading of artificial intelligence researchers on their scientific thought and practice. The full academic article, published in Interdisciplinary Science Reviews is available open access here.
Tag: Artificial Intelligence
Sarah gave a talk and contributed to a discussion on a panel on applied science fiction at the the Royal Anthropological Institute’s conference on Anthropology, AI and the Future of Human Society. She spoke about storylistening and why science fiction matters for public reasoning about artificial intelligence.
In this academic article, Sarah and co-researcher Jennifer Schaffer-Goddard present the findings of their interview study exploring the influence of leisure reading on the scientific practice of contemporary AI researchers (funded by the Royal Society). The research is mentioned in Storylistening in relation to stories and the collective identities of researchers; and one of the categories of influence explored in WAIRR is stories functioning as narrative models, connecting this work explicitly to one of the storylistening functions. For a non-academic summary of the article, see this LSE blog.
Sarah contributed to a panel at the annual CogX festival discussing the future of AI from humanities’ perspectives, including historical and literary critical. Sarah talks (from 20 minutes 33 seconds in) about science fiction, about how AI stories directly inform AI research, and about how AI research is driven by storytelling. She suggests that the very idea of ‘AI’ itself might be thought of as a ‘grand narrative’. She considers the cognitive value of stories, and how storytelling and storylistening offer alternative methods for thinking about what is called ‘AI ethics’.
Claire and Sarah were pleased to trial some early work on stories as anticipatory models in the context of AI at an international symposium at Örebro University on Anticipation and Anticipatory Systems: Humans Meet AI.