It seems artificial intelligence – better known as AI – comes up in conversation or in the news more and more often these days.

AI is here. It’s not going away. It’s becoming integrated into so many aspects of our lives. We’re discovering how ChatGPT can help you write an essay. And, on the darker side, we’re seeing stories of how AI can be used to influence elections and spread disinformation. Should we fear AI? Should we be amazed? Or…what?

Western’s Luke Stark isn’t making a judgement on AI one way or the other. But he does want you to think hard about AI – how it affects our lives and what we want to do about that.

“How do these technologies potentially shape our social lives, our political lives, or our moral lives? That’s really critical."

In fact, it’s not just AI. Stark, an assistant professor in the Faculty of Information & Media Studies, studies the history of all electronic communications technologies – from the advent of the telegraph in the mid-1800s, up to now – and whatever will come next.

“It's hard for me not to think about the past when I'm thinking about the present. And I think combining the two helps give deeper insights into the future."

Stark notes there is a difference between the technology itself and what people do with it. Take the telegraph.

“In the 1840s and ‘50s, you've got telegraph operators who are supposed to be sending messages about railway schedules and the stock market. But when they have downtime, they're sending each other Morse code notes and they're flirting.”

The next big thing, the telephone, was envisioned by Alexander Graham Bell as a tool to assist people with hearing challenges. “And those folks were completely written out of the story of the telephone, once it was perfected and found to have a bigger commercial use.”

Stark emphasizes we need to remember the phone, the TV and the cellphone, and realize computing and AI don’t own us. And he has an interesting way of pointing that out.  

“I tell my students to always think about technologies in the plural, because that goes a little way to deflating that sense of technology as a kind of overarching world historical force that is driving things.”

And he hopes to inspire how others can think about these technologies, in a new and empowering way.

“I often say that artificial intelligence is an aspiration. I think we should say, ‘What kind of society do humans want and how can we use these tools to get us there?’”