Field Notes: Highlights from the Anthropology, AI, and the future of Human Society Conference, 2022

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This week, I attended the Anthropology, AI and the future of Human Society Virtual Conference organized by the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) and co-organized by The British Science Fiction Association (BFSA) and the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA).

The conference program set out to explore the implications and impact of the increasing role of AI, including but not limited to space exploration, autonomous driving, biotech, healthcare, and much more on the future of human society from a broad range of anthropological perspectives.


The opening keynote: Anthropology and Emerging Technologies: Learning to Play in the Future Space, was delivered by Professor Sarah Pink, Director of Emerging Technology Research Lab at Monash University in Australia. Prof. Pink focused on exploring the role of anthropological research and perspective in AI, and automated decision-making as connected smart systems and technology (for example, Alexa and Siri) are increasingly part of our present and imagined futures. The talk had many thought-provoking ideas, concepts, and data from the digital energy project. Something I took away from the discussion was the complexity of AI interactions with human society and the importance of studying how people are currently evolving their beliefs, norms and values based on our increasing reliance on AI-driven systems and how that changes the design of the AI systems themselves.


Some of the other noteworthy talks were from a panel discussion around AI in healthcare.

One of the speakers presented on ethical decision-making in developing healthcare technologies. Specifically, how one can use anthropological approaches to understand how the stakeholders in data-driven technology developers think about norms, values, and responsibilities given the premise that technology does not occur in a value-free space independent of society and is therefore not a neutral activity. For example, by interviewing a group of technology developers, they were able to identify themes that appear to drive innovation - business ethics vs. healthcare ethics and the potential for built-in biases guiding the technology and its impact on healthcare ethics. 


Another speaker at the AI and healthcare panel presented on Dataveillance - An anthropological perspective about self-tracking as a mental health practice.  I suppose many of us have used some health app on our smartphones, so this one was interesting. The speaker presented compelling reasons to study the extent to which we willingly allow AI's role in our lives and how the narratives around well-being and what it means to live well are being influenced by normalizing the use of AI. It also highlighted the need to balance the access to care that these apps can provide with the concern for protecting the privacy of individuals using them.


Furthermore, this is the first time I have attended an international conference. Therefore, it was initially quite overwhelming to think about getting started. In this regard, I found the article, Ten simple rules for attending your first conference quite helpful. Essentially, the suggestion was to choose a conference that aligns with your interests, allow yourself enough time to take in the logistics, and plan a strategy for attendance. In my case, I chose this conference as it combines two topics I am currently interested in AI and Anthropology. Since this conference was held virtually in a different time zone, my plan included looking over the schedule ahead of time, choosing the few talks I was interested in, and adding them to my calendar. It was also helpful that some of the sessions had provided links to recorded videos shortly after the talk, and I didn’t have to stay up to 2 AM to watch them live. 


Overall, I thank the Royal Anthropological Institute for giving me an opportunity to attend the conference as a high school student. I am glad I attended this conference. It made me think about the issues around the use of AI in the future of human society, particularly when it comes to healthcare advances where the technology has a definite potential for a positive impact but would certainly benefit from learning from an anthropological perspective.

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