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This event is a Core Conversation at the 2019 Pittsburgh Humanities Festival. See the full Core Conversation lineup here.

What exactly is AI (artificial intelligence)? Designer, writer, speaker, and professor Molly Wright Steenson suggests that if we judge AI by the images we see online and in movies, it's hard to get an idea. It looks mysterious, futuristic, sinister, confusing, and out of reach. Yet, we're all interacting with AI every day, but we don't see it because it's behind the scenes. The fact is, it's hard to talk about AI because we don't really understand it, we can't visualize it—and so we turn to clichés. In this talk, Steenson will look at some of the big clichés around AI as a way to learn about it and understand it better.

Molly Wright Steenson is the Senior Associate Dean for Research, College of Fine Arts; the K&L Gates Associate Professor of Ethics & Computational Technologies; and associate professor in the School of Design. at Carnegie Mellon University. She is the author of Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape (MIT Press, 2017), which explores the radical history of design, architecture, AI and cybernetics from the 1950s to the present.

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