Genevieve Bell: we need to build a new applied science
CBA’s new director was an anthropologist, then she worked for a global tech giant. Now she’s wrangling artificial intelligence.
Pioneering Australian technologist Genevieve Bell is musing about why she decided to return to her home country two years ago on an ambitious mission to tackle one of the knottiest and most important problems of our time: how do we live with artificial intelligence.
Last Christmas, she tells me, she took herself to outback NSW to see the Brewarrina fish traps on the Barwon River. The traps are long snaking lines of rocks built by indigenous people on a part of the river where the bed is bare rock and the water descends quickly in shallow rapids. The rocks are placed so they direct fish into shallow pools where they can be scooped up.
Originally almost 2km long, the lines of rocks in the Barwon River are thought to be possibly the oldest existing structure in the world built by humans, although much of it was degraded or destroyed by European settlers who used it as a convenient source of construction stone.
“I really wanted to go stand with one of the oldest technical systems humans had built that we still know about,” Bell says. “I was thinking about what it meant to build something new in Australia and about what it meant to build something new in the continent that has been the longest continuously occupied place.”
The relevance for Bell is that she’s on a similar mission – building something new in Australia. After 30 years overseas, 20 of them in Silicon Valley where she rose to be an Intel vice-president and the company’s first ever female senior fellow, she came home to Canberra at the behest of Australian National University vice-chancellor Brian Schmidt.
He asked Bell to set up a new research institute at the ANU to fulfil her ambitious plan: to build a new applied science to guide humans as they tackle the big challenge of living and working with artificial intelligence. Since her return, she has made an impact. In January she was appointed to the Commonwealth Bank board and she has also delivered the ABC Boyer lectures, explaining “what it is to be human, and Australian, in a digital world”.
At ANU, Bell has the title of distinguished professor. She holds the Florence Violet Mackenzie Chair in the College of Engineering and Computer Science, named after Australia’s first female electrical engineer. But she has come to this place by a peculiar path. She’s actually an anthropologist, not a technologist, and her special fields were originally feminist theory and native American ethnography. (In becoming an anthropologist she followed her mother, Diane Bell.) She did her doctorate at Stanford and was on tenure track at the university when a chance conversation in a bar led to Intel hiring her to do research on how people use technology. It was a fruitful move. Bell became a pioneer in applying social science techniques to analysing the impact of technology and how humans interact with it.
At the ANU she has set up the Autonomy, Agency and Assurance Institute, which conveniently contracts to 3Ai, an abbreviation which immediately tells you what it’s about. Its focus is the impact of cyber physical technology, that is, the growing web of artificial intelligence embedded in things such as autonomous vehicles, smart lifts, Google searches, social media and decision-making algorithms. It interacts with us in increasingly complex ways and on a rapidly growing scale.
“Managing those systems safely to scale is one of the biggest challenges we have in the 21st century and my argument continues to be that we do not have the necessary competencies to do that work,” Bell says. For that, she believes, we need a new applied science.
She explains it by analogy to other new technologies introduced in the past which led to a new corpus of knowledge, new industries and institutions, new regulatory systems and regulation, and huge changes in the way people lived, worked and related to each other.
One of her favoured examples is the steam engine. The first practical and commercially successfully example was the so-called atmospheric engine, which was built in England by Thomas Newcomen in 1712 to draw water out of mines. It was a revolutionary advance, which made mines more productive as well as safer for miners.
“The thing is two stories high and it’s really fuel-inefficient, and it’s different than anything that ever came before it,” Bell says. “It’s the first time you have this piece of machinery that can do more than a human can do. It never sleeps, it doesn’t need to eat, it doesn’t need to rest and it changed what you could do in a mine for ever.”
That, in itself, was an extraordinary technological advance. But it then went places nobody could have predicted. It took more than 100 years but the atmospheric engine, which was the size of a house, was reimagined into something small enough to drive a wheeled vehicle.
In 1829, Robert Stephenson demonstrated the first successful railway locomotive, the Rocket. “It was a massive reinvention of what it (the steam engine) could do,” Bell says. “Suddenly there were trains, which rapidly developed into railway systems. But in order to have railways many other things needed to happen. You have people starting to worry about safety. You needed people to think about where do you put rail lines and how do you organise easements and railway crossings, what does it mean to think about having things moving at that speed. Then you built railway stations and you get these changes in the landscape.”
Railways also irrevocably changed something which was absolutely fundamental. “Up until then, towns in Britain had decided their own time, setting the town hall clock to 12 noon when the sun was at its highest point,” Bell says. But the railways needed time to be synchronised in every place the trains ran, so the rail companies invented railway time that was standard across Britain.
“From the 1830s to 1880 every town had two times, the time on the town hall clock and the railway station clock. Which was kind of demented, right? The British parliament basically passed a law in 1880 which effectively said railway time will become standard time.”
For Bell, it’s a telling example of a new technology having a fundamental impact way out of its field. “You have a technical system changing the way we thought about something that feels as ephemeral as time,” she says.
The impact of the railway didn’t stop there. In the United States it led to the invention of mail order purchasing as Sears and Roebuck used trains to distribute their goods. It also led to ice cream, because the speed of trains made it possible to move ice around the country.
So where is artificial intelligence taking us? That’s hard to anticipate, Bell says, because she believes we have so far to go. “I think we’re in atmospheric engine territory,” is how she puts it.
However her job is to build the new applied science to deal with the impact of artificial intelligence. If we can’t tell where it’s going, how do we know what problems to solve? Bell’s answer is that her new applied science is not yet about solving problems, it’s about asking the right questions.
She appeals to another piece of history to illustrate what she is doing – cybernetics, the discipline originated by mathematician and polymath Norbert Weiner, who was a famous technological guru in the middle years of the 20th century. “When he was talking about cybernetics in the ’40s he kept talking about a feedback system that included technical systems, the human system and ecological systems,” Bell says.
For Bell the key element is that all three have to be taken together. “You need to think about it as a system of systems, not as three individual pieces,” she says.
And the ecology piece is critically important. Climate change and environmental challenges: “Those are conversations that should not be distant from the conversation we have about our technical future.”
Nor should we let ourselves grow too pessimistic, Bell believes. She says we should also be talking about using the power of technology to be creative in new ways. She’s interested in “how we tell stories and how we make beauty and art, and things which are slightly more transcendent”.
Her thinking on all these issues is being expressed in a new masters degree just launched at the ANU by her 3A Institute. It has got off to a good start: 176 people applied for the 16 places in the pilot course which started in February.
Is she glad she came back to Australia to do this? Yes. “I missed home,” she says. “It’s been 30 years. It’s a long time to keep a place in your heart, right?”
Bell also says it’s good to be doing this work outside the insularity of Silicon Valley. And she credits Schmidt with backing her two years ago, when she thinks other universities would have demurred. “I suspect the kind of thing I’m doing would have been very hard to convince an American university to do two years ago, not so much now,” she says.
Other universities are now putting resources into answering similar questions, she says, but not in the same way. “I’m still the only person crazy enough to think we need to build a new applied science.”
Working in Australia also has a downside – dealing with the niggling sense in our culture that we’re not quite good enough. On one level Bell thinks she’s moved past that. “Twenty years in Silicon Valley left me with a very strong willingness to back myself.”
Nevertheless she is still astounded she has got as far as she has. She’s amazed that students want to do her course, and that Microsoft, Macquarie Bank and KPMG have backed it. “I’m astonished every day and that’s a good thing.”
But she’s also willing to give herself credit for getting as far as she has. “I can be very determined. And I’m still convinced I’m not ... (and here she pauses) ... I’m not wrong.” Immediately she sees the irony. “I sound like an Australian. Jeez, that’s amazing.” She circles back to say it again in a different way. “I’m still convinced it’s right.”
Last October she was invited to speak at an event in Silicon Valley for Wired magazine’s 25th anniversary. Also on the stage that day were Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, HP CEO Dion Weisler and Amazon boss Jeff Bezos. “And I’m sort of thinking, what the hell am I doing here? I’m so not worthy.”
But then, she had another realisation.
“It was one of the few places in the world you could comfortably stand on stage, square your shoulders, take a deep breath and say ‘I’m building a new applied science because I know it’s the right thing to do’. And no-one said: ‘Why are you doing that?’ They went: ‘What can I do to help?’ ”
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