Genevieve Bell – The Humanity Guardian in the Digital World
Dr. Genevieve Bell is an Australian cultural anthropologist and techno-anthropologist born in Sydney. She is the daughter of a renowned Anthropologist, and she grew up with her mother at field sites. Dr. Bell graduated from Bryn Mawr College in the United States in 1990 with a Bachelor of Arts and a master’s degree of Philosophy in Anthropology. In 1998, she completed her Master and PhD degree in Stanford University, both in Anthropology. After completing her PhD degree, she worked at Intel in Silicon Valley as the Senior Fellow and Vice President for 18 years. Her work included guiding the product development, design research capabilities and social science. In 2017, she presented the Boyer Lectures, in which she discussed and studied the meaning of being human in a digital world. She was also named the inaugural Florence McKenzie Chair as Australia’s first female electrical engineer in 2017. Same year she started working at the Australian National University College of Engineering & Computer Science as a Distinguished Professor, and she was appointed the director of the Autonomy, Agency and Assurance (3A) Institute, an institute established to control and manage the impact of artificial intelligence and technology on humanity. In 2019, Dr. Bell was appointed as an independent non-executive director of Commonwealth Bank of Australia, for which she was expected to use her knowledge and insight about technology in society and business to improve the financial wellbeing of the bank and its customers.
In the essay “Are Public Intellectuals a thing of the Past?”, Professor Stephen Mack stated that in the last two decades, public intellectuals have struggled greatly in terms of exerting influence to the public. “Giving expression to a certain kind of anxiety of influence has become a cliched preoccupation of public intellectuals in the last two decades… a more pedestrian sort of whining about their apparent inability to exert any influence in the public square”. (Mack, 2012). Dr. Bell, as a public intellectual, used to exemplify the difficulty of being unable to make an impact to the public before she started working at Intel. In an interview she talked about when an Intel recruiter from Intel asked her what she can do with anthropology, as excited as she was, she had no idea. The sense of cluelessness may be a shared one among the public intellectuals in Professor Mack’s essay. However, as soon as she started working at Intel, she brought a strong impact to the public as an intellectual.
After graduating from Stanford in 1998, Dr. Bell started teaching Anthropology at her alma mater. One night she met a man at a bar who, after hearing what she had to say about anthropology, believed that she had more to offer in the technology field and later invited her to join Intel as a cultural anthropologist. She studied how people from different cultures around the world interact with technology. In one of her fieldwork reports “Getting Connected, staying connected: exploring the role of new technology in Australian society”, she wrote: “I still do fieldwork…I needed to talk to South Australians about what they wanted and needed from new technology and to identify the big barriers to adoption. In short, I would need to do fieldwork”. She used the data she gathered to start a user-experience lab which focused on the customers' experiences. The lab studied questions of smart transportation, big data, future technology and fear and wonder related to technology.
This was the first user experience lab and later the company named Dr. Bell the director of the lab. Throughout the 18 years of working at Intel, Dr. Bell reimagined Intel’s direction of future product development to a more human and experience-driven way. At the beginning of working at Intel, Dr. Bell often found herself to be the only woman, the only social scientist, and the only non-engineer in the meeting room. She gradually learned to imagine and turn these factors as an advantage. Not long after, she became the director of user interaction and experience in Intel Labs, where she led a team of social scientists, computer scientists, human factors engineers and interaction designers. This team studied and helped redefine Intel’s technologies and products focusing on people’s experiences and needs. In an interview titled “Dr. Genevieve Bell, Director of User Interaction and Experience, Intel, 2012”, Dr. Bell stated that she steered the team to a direction that fundamentally changed how Intel looked at their future products; she made Intel, a technology company, believe that the future of computing is experiences and that technology is only as good as what it will do to people, thus greatly changed their users’ experiences.
After leaving Intel, Dr. Bell joined 3A Institute, the first innovation institute at the Australian National University, co-founded by the Australian National University and CSIRO’s Data6. Its mission is to innovate a branch of engineering that minimizes the negative and anti-human aspects of Artificial-Intelligent-powered cyber-physical systems when it unavoidably scales in the society. “Twenty years in Silicon Valley has left me with the distinct sense that we need to keep reasserting the importance of people, and the diversity of our lived experiences, into our conversations about technology and the future.” (Genevieve Bell, 2017). Dr. Bell is devoted to creating a future characterized by environmental sustainability, social wellbeing and equality, and economic prosperity.
In Professor Mack’s essay, criticism is considered the main function of public intellectual: “Put more prosaically, public intellectuals perform an important social function…Elshtain’s point is that the public intellectual function is criticism…It is only because learning the processes of criticism and practicing them with some regularity are requisites for intellectual employment”. Not many of Dr. Bell’s works involve criticism, in fact, none was found during the writing of this essay. However, Dr. Bell questions the development of artificial intelligence. Instead of criticizing or opposing its existence, she critically questions the rationality of its development from a humanity’s perspective.
Dr. Bell performed a speech at TED Talk in January 2021 as the director of the 3A Institute. The title of her speech is “6 Big Ethical Questions About the Future AI”, in which Dr. Bell talked about the essential mission of 3A Institute, which is “safely, responsibly and sustainably scale Artificial Intelligence”, and she believes that in order to explore more challenges and possibilities, the scientists and engineers involved in the institute need to go beyond general problem solving to a more sophisticated way, which is problem asking and problem framing. When approaching the institute’s essential idea, she often asks six ethical questions about autonomy, agency, assurance, indicators, interfaces and intentionality. The questions are based on the fact that AI is already everywhere around us in buildings, systems and our daily life, such as elevators.
The first question: “Is the AI system autonomous?”. Meaning will the system act without being told to act. For example, will our elevators, one day, become autonomous; will it go up and down without people inside or outside pressing the button? The second question: “Does the system have agency?”. Does the system have controls to stop the system to do certain things under certain conditions? Like the red key slot in elevator carriage that allows an emergency-control person to overwrite the system by sticking a key inside, but when that system becomes AI-driven, who controls the key? Will the key still exist? The third question: “How do we think about assurance?”. Like security, manageability, liability, trust, risk, ethics, law, public policy and regulation, and how to inform the users that the AI system is safe and functioning with all these pieces? The fourth question: “What would the interfaces be like with AI-driven systems?”. Will the interfaces talk to each other? To us? Or will we talk to them? What does it mean when some technologies we’ve known for so long like cars, washing machines, elevators, suddenly behave completely differently? The fifth question: “What will the indicators be to show the AI-driven systems are working well?”. The industrial revolution teaches us that the two factors to consider whether a system is a good one is efficiency and productivity, but in 21st century, the idea of a good system should involve sustainability, safety and responsibility, but the question is, who gets to judge these? The last and the most critical question: “What is the intent?” What is the AI system designed for and who gets to decide whether it’s a good idea for the world? Those who are developing AI systems, what kind of future world do they have in mind and what is its relationship to our current world?
Dr. Bell believes that none of these questions have a simple answer but asking them helps pointing the 3A Institute to the right direction; they help framing, imagining, building, and regulating their approach to their core mission. 3A Institute looks at AI as a system, and one of their missions is to draw boundaries of the system, and how and where to draw the boundaries is another question that they constantly ask themselves. The 3A institute is devoted to helping make sure the system accommodates culture, technology and environment using new insights and research to form a new field of practice. They aim to deliver a system that not only has technology, but also people, culture and broader ecological structure. As the director of 3A Institute, Dr. Bell steers the institute with anthropology tenet: people first.
In the essay “Are Public Intellectuals a thing of the Past?”, Professor Mack quoted John Donatich, who believed that the era of public intellectual has passed: “The very words ‘future of the public intellectual’ seem to have a kind of nostalgia built into them, in that we only worry over the future of something that seems endangered, something we have been privileged to live with and are terrified to bury”. Based on Dr. Bell’s career path and intellectual achievements, it is possible that Dr. Bell would have to face a similar dilemma as the public intellectuals mentioned in the quote if she failed to connect her expertise to technology and artificial intelligence --- the two subjects that everyone cares about, that everyone believes would shape our future. Working in such a field as an interdisciplinary scientist, it is difficult for her work not to attract attention from the public and raise a sense of importance.
From 2008 to 2010, Dr. Bell participated in a program called Thinker in Residence and visited South Australia as an anthropologist. Her field work was expected to guide the government policy in building a new national broadband program. Although she effectively used the gathered data for Intel’s users experience lab, there is no follow-up information stating whether her field work exerted any influence on the public, nor did she receive any recognition. However, after 18 years of working at Intel, when she returned to Australia, her work related to AI and technology was recognized by both the industry and the government. Dr. Bell received Overall 2016 Advance Global Australian Award and the Award for Technology Innovation at the 2016 Advance Awards. Two years later in 2018, Dr. Bell was appointed by the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering (ATSE) as a fellow. The ATSE is a nonprofit organization that gathers the leading thinkers in engineering and technology from different industries, academia, and government. Dr. Bell’s awards list goes a long way from being named one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business by Fast Company to one of the Top 25 Women in Technology to Watch by AlwaysOn. It is obvious that all her major intellectual achievements are related to technology or AI development. As an anthropologist, her career path focuses on technology much more than anthropology alone, which might be the reason why her career challenges or even counter-exemplifies the concerns in Professor Mack’s essay.
Works Cited
Bell, G. (2009, September). Getting Connected, Staying Connected: Exploring South Australia’s Digital Futures. Retrieved from https://innovationandskills.sa.gov.au/upload/digital-technology/Genevieve%20Bell%20Thinker%20in%20Residence%20-%20getting%20connected.pdf?t=1526256000045
Bell, G. (Writer). (2021, January). 6 Big Ethical Questions About the Future AI [Transcript, Radio series episode]. In TedTalk.
Bell, G., Dr. (2012, June 7). Dr. Genevieve Bell, Director of User Interaction and Experience, Intel, 2012 [Interview]. WITI Innovation. Inspiration. Inclusivity.
Bell, G., Dr. (n.d.). Home page. Retrieved February 14, 2021, from https://3ainstitute.org/
Mack, S., Dr. (2012, August 14). Are Public Intellectuals a thing of the Past? [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://www.stephenmack.com/blog/archives/2012/08/are_public_inte.html
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