Three Obituaries for Margaret Ann Boden


Prof Margaret Boden; Credit: Jay Williams (click through for source)

It's normal though tragic for the elderly to die. What's more tragic is the number of people posting they wish they'd met Margret Boden. What it took to meet her – frequently! – was participating in UK AI meetings. She was deeply committed to for example AISB, and frequently honoured by it. Sadly – despite the UK long leading in AI – British research councils stopped supporting such meetings because the meetings were merely "national." We all in every locale need to support our local networks, universities, and students as well as putting some time into keeping up with more global efforts. Maggie was fantastic at this – I'm pretty sure both of the most recent two times I talked to her were at the Houses of Parliament, where Steve Torrance often supported her participation, given her mobility issues. She came not only when she spoke, but also to listen in the audience. Keeping engaged with those trying to improve the world through the British government and media was Boden's project through her long retirement. 

More tragic even than these missed opportunities are the number of people being killed, maimed, and starved in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Sahel, Ethiopia, and Myanmar or even just losing their health and the days of their lives in illegal detention centres in countries like the United States. As I struggle with the tragedies of losing people born in 1936, I wonder how to effect a future where we can be more efficacious in defending the lives of people who should be this planet's future. 

Thanks to Margaret Boden for all the work she did over the years, and to everyone who loved and promoted and supported her. May we all do the same for each other.


The above is what I wrote on facebook about the death of Margaret Boden. I also posted it here under the title

Margaret Boden and Gaza

I was (and still am) expecting to expand this post. When I first posted it I said I would expand it:  'to include at a minimum a recounting of the time she, Sherry Turkle, and I were the "conservatives" claiming that humans were more than just our ideas, so AI could not be us. This was in the context of the meeting at Oxford convened by Yorick Wilks that turned into the book that includes the chapter Robots Should Be Slaves.'

I also thanked Ezequiel Di Paolo for surfacing the excellent picture of her I use here (which he did on his own facebook post.) And mentioned that I'd personally attended AISB every year for years, even when I was attending MIT and living in Massachusetts. I ran their annual meeting at Bath in 2017. Our theme that year was 'Society with AI.'



A few days after I posted the above, Nature asked me to write an obituary for Margaret Boden. I should have turned them down, and I did initially, suggesting Ron Chrisley instead. I couldn't really see why they had suggested me other than sexism, but no doubt some AI system had noticed my blogposts and coauthorship(s) with her (only on the UK's 2011 Principles of Robotics policy "soft law," but also that 2017 archival journal version.) 

But I woke up at 3am with an idea and wrote a 900 page obituary in about 3 hours, going through some of her publications and interviews, and Boden's very useful online CV she's left us, no doubt not least for this time. I had three themes I wanted for the obituary, which I thought Boden was due. First, of course her life. Second, the broader understanding of AI and Cognitive Science that she pursued, and how generative AI was just a fraction of that. That second theme is still vaguely visible in Nature. The  third – which was pretty well expunged by Nature's editorial process – was the difference between the more British/European polymath understanding of our discipline, and the more US engineering-led discipline that's led to the context presently dominating global headlines.  

The first paragraph of my original draft was:

The world lost one of the few-remaining members of the founding generation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) research last week. Margaret Ann Boden (26 November 1936 – 18 July 2025) was the sort of polymath that Europe and particularly Britain has long believed the AI discipline mandates. She was particularly famous for her ground-breaking work on computational models of creativity. The abstract of her seminal 1998 paper “Creativity and artificial intelligence” in the field’s then-leading journal, Artificial Intelligence, is so short and clear it can be quoted here in its entirety: 

Creativity is a fundamental feature of human intelligence, and a challenge for AI. AI techniques can be used to create new ideas in three ways: by producing novel combinations of familiar ideas; by exploring the potential of conceptual spaces; and by making transformations that enable the generation of previously impossible ideas. AI will have less difficulty in modelling the generation of new ideas than in automating their evaluation.

That final sentence – in classic British understatement – is now terrifyingly manifest in the swirling AI-generated “misinformation” plaguing everything from students’ essays to legal opinions to the latest, DOGE-built US government software. We should be very afraid of anyone who, unlike Boden, doesn’t understand how creativity fits into an overall psyche. 
 

Somehow Nature didn't let that fly. 


From here on in this is still under construction:

A lot of people assume the US has always led at AI. By most semantic definitions of the term, Boden had been in the field, in fact joined the field  the same year (1956) as the Dartmouth Conference that established the term 'AI'. Given her interests, you might say she was studying philosophy of mind, but then why did she do it with a medical degree? (Apparently she finished her 3 year degree in 2 years, not only attaining the highest mark in her degree, but in any natural science at Cambridge that year. I have no idea how to fact check that, but the BBC journalist Jim Al-Khalili believed her.) Immediately the next year, she joined a "philosophy" lab at Cambridge already working on the problem of machine translation. 



Today I am working through a paper I'm writing on moral agency in governments, and I suddenly reflected on how much it mattered that the US narrative is dominated not even by particularly good engineers, but by (admittedly decent) programmers who were also entrepreneurs.  I came to AI because it was interesting, but more because intelligence was interesting and I just happened to be exceptionally good at programming. So I leveraged my strengths in programming to get into the best university programs I could, despite having mediocre undergraduate grades (though from a great school.)

I often get asked how I knew to go into AI so early. Honestly, on some "imposter syndrome" level I think it is luck, that there are scientists distributed over all sorts of interests. But on another level, what else could possibly be as interesting or important as intelligence – as understanding ourselves? 

Why did Boden and I wind up working so much with governments and governance? Why do China and the EU have AI regulation and the US not? How is it not evident that passing agency into mechanism is of enormous legal and moral concern? I'm not sure, and I'm up against a deadline, but I wanted to remember I have these questions, so here they are. But always in the back of my mind is the fact that the US was founded by fundamentalist whackos, who have always seen the world as black and white (sadly in more ways than one.) Maybe it just seemed self evident to enough people with enough power that only (white male) humans were really conscious, intelligent, or other codewords for "interesting," and thus AI was only ever really the domain for engineers. Now even from strictly a domestic US perspective, disproportionate power has shifted to those engineers because of inadequate attention to wealth.

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