A provocation film produced by Ellen Broad for the Telstra Creativity and Innovation Series Keynote 2021

Every technology comes from a time and place. For the development of artificial intelligence (AI), that place over the past seventy years has primarily been the northern hemisphere, and in particular, the United States. But what if over the next seventy years, the future of AI design was driven by someplace else?

As we contemplate a world transformed by a global pandemic, by climate change, by increasingly sophisticated digital systems, the values and expectations driving technology development are being re-examined and ‘Normal’ is up for debate. So what could an ‘Australian’ approach to AI design look like? How might it look different from the way AI is designed today? Where could we draw inspiration?

Embracing these questions, this special, two-part Melbourne Design Week event begins with a prelude to a live panel discussion at the NGV. Broad directs and narrates an immersive audio-visual experience featuring visual collages by Eryk Salvaggio and sound work by The Organising Committee, that explores the entanglement of technology, imagination, culture and place.

This provocation film is part of the Telstra Creativity and Innovation Series Keynote: Redesigning Artificial Intelligence – From Australia Out event. A panel discussion with Ellen Broad (via video link), Fiona Milne and Tyson Yunkaporta, moderated by Marion Joseph was held in response to the provocation video, hosted by Telstra and NGV as part of Melbourne Design Week 2021.

Watch the full event and panel discussion.

Produced by

Ellen Broad is a researcher and senior fellow with the School of Cybernetics, founded by Distinguished Professor Genevieve Bell within the College of Engineering and Computer Science at Australian National University. Ellen has spent more than a decade working in the technology sector in Australia, the UK and Europe, in senior roles spanning engineering, standards development and policy for organisations including CSIRO’s Data61, the Open Data Institute in the UK and as an adviser to UK Cabinet Minister Elizabeth Truss. She is a frequent keynote speaker and writer on AI and governance issues and has written for publications including The Guardian, New Scientist and Griffith Review. She is the author of Made by Humans: the AI Condition (Melbourne University Publishing, 2018) and co-designer of a board game about open data, alongside ODI Vice President Jeni Tennison, that is being played in 19 countries.