We have been talking about robots and artificial intelligence forever, or so it sometimes seems. Images of smart machinery have inhabited our thinking and our literary and cultural imaginations long before technology made such objects possible. It is tempting to keep separate the art and science of the robot and the artificial intelligence that underpins it. However, there are reasons to thread them back together. After all, the AI of our imagination is the AI we have built.
Genevieve Bell explores the meaning of “intelligence” within the context of machines and its cultural impact on humans and their relationships. Genevieve interrogates AI not just as a technical agenda but as a cultural category in order to understand the ways in which the story of AI is connected to the history of human culture.
Dr. Genevieve Bell is an Australian-born anthropologist and researcher. As director of User Interaction and Experience in Intel Labs, she leads a research team of social scientists, interaction designers, human factors engineers, and computer scientists. This team shapes and helps create new Intel technologies and products that are increasingly designed around people’s needs and desires. In this team and her prior roles, Dr. Bell has fundamentally altered the way Intel envisions and plans its future products so that they are centered on people’s needs rather than simply silicon capabilities.
In addition to leading this increasingly important area of research at Intel, Dr. Bell is an accomplished industry pundit on the intersection of culture and technology. She is a regular public speaker and panelist at technology conferences worldwide, sharing insights gained from her extensive international field work and research. In 2011 she co-wrote “Divining the Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing” with Prof. Paul Dourish of UC Irvine. In 2010, Dr. Bell was named one of Fast Company’s inaugural “100 Most Creative People in Business.” She also is the recipient of several patents for consumer electronics innovations.
Moving to the United States for her undergraduate studies, she graduated from Bryn Mawr with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology. She then attended Stanford University, earning her master’s degree and a doctorate in cultural anthropology, as well as acting as a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology. With a father who was an engineer and a mother who was an anthropologist, perhaps Dr. Bell was fated to ultimately work for a technology company, joining Intel in 1998.
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