Justine Cassell

"I’m not going to answer it because I’m not a futurist, I’m a scientist. I do not believe in making predictions about the future; I believe in understanding what the possibilities are, and then trying to make the best one become the future. I am going to try to convince you that AI can help us better understand social interaction, that it can create a positive future in the form of systems that evoke natural social interaction from people in an increasingly technological world, and that it can preserve one of the aspects of humanity that we care most about—our sociality."

"AI appears to be evoking a similar kind of moral panic, but in this case it’s more about a perceived threat to our capacity for empathy. Have we become more willing to inflict great pain on others without misgivings? Have we lost our sense of responsibility for one another? In that context, my research program, which has strong continuities with my graduate work in linguistics and psychology, is to understand better how we interact with one another, how we work, play, and learn with our peers, then to understand whether AI is ineluctably making those interactions worse. If it is not, then we can work toward an AI that will maintain the good—perhaps even make it better. In my early years as a researcher, I attempted to better understand how we use language and the body to enhance interactions with others. Today I have added technology to the mix, and have added the challenge of building AI entities that jointly use language and the body to work, play, and learn with others. The knowledge that results from these experiments allows us to build technology that better supports our interpersonal and community goals. And those technologies can be a way to better understand how we work and play and learn."