We humans are meaning making machines, driven by the desire to make sense of our life experiences, relationships, the world around us, and ourselves. AI could be an incredibly powerful tool to help us. Indeed, I propose that a core goal of AI should be to enable humans to make meaning.
However, AI's capability is currently limited by failing to engage the richness of human meaning making. First, we make meaning through experience, including through art that delivers emotionally powerful aesthetic experiences that provoke deep interpretation. Second, our meaning making is embodied, intimately bound up with our bodily senses, subconscious emotions, and feelings, alongside conscious reflective thought. Third, as evidenced by growing societal concerns about trust in AI, we struggle to make meaning of AI itself and must find new ways to do so if it in turn, is to help us make meaning.
My fellowship responds to these challenges by engaging AI with artistic practice and thinking to create embodied experiences that encourage human meaning making. My team will apply artist-led and practice-led research methods, collaborating with renowned artists to create and tour a portfolio of artworks that engage public audiences with robots as a uniquely embodied form of AI. We will iteratively reflect across our growing portfolio to derive foundational concepts, methods, tools and ethical guidelines, combining these into new multi-disciplinary methodology for AI experience design. We will create a public archive of performance documentation and datasets to share with the wider research community.
Somabotics will directly impact the Creative Industries, who will benefit from seeing how AI can enable novel cultural experiences rather than cheaply replicating current ones; the public, where sensitively designed AI artworks will engage audiences in ethical reflection, provoking them make new meanings of AI's role in society; and industry, where partners in affective computing, robotics and haptics will benefit from our techniques, tools and methods.
However, while these new artworks will undoubtedly be impactful, my goal is not so much to apply AI to generate new art as it is to harness artistic thinking and practice to transform AI. My fundamental contribution to the field will be to change the conception of AI from being a kind of technology to instead being a kind of experience. Along the way, I will challenge conventional thinking that AI must always be correct, verifiable, explainable, and unbiased, to consider how sometimes it might usefully be ambiguous, interpretable, improvisational, opinionated, and playful.
In so doing, I aim to extend AI's epistemological foundations beyond its dominant positivist and reductionist stance, to embrace interpretivist and subjectivist schools of thought that acknowledge the ambiguous and fluid nature of meaning making and apply critical thinking to champion diversity and inclusivity. Such thinking is necessary for AI to engage the arts, but also has wider relevance in domains where humans make self-meaning such as wellbeing, or need to take complex decisions where there is no clear and perfect response.
I will enhance the UK's capability for such research by recruiting and developing a team of eleven researchers at Nottingham, including three Assistant Professors to ensure sustainability beyond the fellowship. I will grow an international Somabotics research community, seeded through my ongoing collaborations with UK and international Universities that have laid the groundwork for this proposal.
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