Another blogpost that is really an email. But if I'm going to write and link all this stuff, I may as well share it!
Dear [friend...]
If you really want to know about AI history, I wrote a long blogpost with quite a lot in it because Nature asked me to write an obituary for Margaret Boden, who had been doing AI (NLP/semantics) since before the Dartmouth meeting. It goes through a lot of history including the differences between the UK & US thinking, but it's only if you're really interested in the topic. https://joanna-bryson.blogspot.com/2025/07/margaret-boden-and-gaza.html I could be wrong but I doubt you'd use much of what I talked about; it's a bit edgy.
You're probably thinking of the AISB symposium Dave Gunkel & I ran that you attended in 2012. That really was not that early. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/AISB-IACAP-World-Congress-2012-Gunkel-Bryson/b573588e7798c9ab7f214a8544c4b3374dbc8ac5
The first national AI ethics softlaw that I know if was the UK's Principles of Robotics, written 2010, published online by the British Research Councils in 2011. There's pictures from the 2010 event in the Maggie blogpost. I wrote a paper about them for another AISB meeting on their fifth anniversary (2016) https://joanna-bryson.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-meaning-of-epsrc-principles-of.html The 2019 OECD Principles of AI look strikingly similar. (Not coincidentally, I was invited to speak at their meetings in 2016 and 2017 and wrote a white paper for them.)
In 2013 Stuart Russell had me on a plenary panel at IJCAI called "the future of AI: what if we succeed" My brief notes on it are here https://joanna-bryson.blogspot.com/2013/08/ijcai-2013-panel-future-of-ai-what-if.html
The first AI ethics meeting I attended was also at AISB, in 2000. You can read the proceedings here https://aisb.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/AISB00_Ethics.pdf (weird URL) including my paper on the "Humanoid Agent-builders; League" (get it?) which had three suggested AI laws, one of which wound up being in the EPSRC. Not that many people attended, maybe 10 or 12, but some big names came.
The guy who organised that, Blay Whitby, has been writing about this since the 1980s. He's terrible at publishing / self promotion but he's very easy to talk to. I just saw him at Boden's memorial event at AISB this year (the first year I'd gone since Brexit.) Here are his pre 1990 papers https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=blay+whitby&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_ylo=&as_yhi=1990
Looking at them, they seem to come out of Weizenbaum. I hadn't realised Weizenbaum really thought it was evil NOT to use AI on important topics, like preventing nuclear war. I got asked to write something for his centenary https://ojs.weizenbaum-institut.de/index.php/wjds/article/view/3_3_8
The oldest thing I ever put on my slides is usually I J Good, writing about "our final invention" around the year I was born. Year after. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0065245808604180
But then there's always Metropolis, and actually I do include that on my slides sometimes. If you come to Berlin, with a little planning we can see it played with a live orchestra; they do that quite often. Oh, it's 100th birthday is coming up! https://babylonberlin.eu/orchester/1334-metropolis-live-babylon-orchester-berlin
Yours
Joanna
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| Seriously, click the link above if you're ever thinking of coming to Berlin, it's well worth seeing live! |
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