Science Forum 2020: Solving global crises requires breaking through barriers
The need to break through the barriers between and within the sciences and social sciences was a central theme at the Science Forum, co-hosted by the Department of Science and Innovation and the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC). The event itself, a virtual undertaking, brought together thinkers of multiple disciplines, across Africa and internationally. It also marked the launch of partnerships committed to open science, including the New South Africa-China cross border incubation programme for start-up enterprises.
The future of AI
In a panel on artificial intelligence (AI) futures, speakers discussed the transdisciplinary nature of AI research. To direct technological advancement towards futures that we want, “we need to understand our societies and politics and cultures, our histories and the trajectories that they have set us on”, said Dr Stephen Cave, director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge.
Referencing the annual Barrydale puppet parade, Professor Jane Taylor, director of the Laboratory of Kinetic Objects, spoke about the ways in which AI entities, like puppets, reflect the selves we project on to them. In this way, AI research is an opportunity to explore what it means to be alive and what it means to be human in relation to the rest of the world.
It challenges us to resist the tendency, as humans, or as members of a particular group or gender or discipline, to set ourselves apart and above. In the words of Ramphele, planetary emergencies require that we learn “to embrace the interconnectedness and interdependence of the Earth as a living system”. In 1543, the scientist Nicolaus Copernicus discovered that the sun does not revolve around the Earth. Now, as then, it may be by moving away from our perceived centrality that we take our next leap in understanding ― in this way, ironically, we might reclaim our humanity.
Review by Andrea Teagle.
Andrea Teagle is a science writer at the Human Sciences Research Council, where she focuses on health, education, and development research news. She has worked as a journalist at several news outlets, including Quartz and the Daily Maverick, where she received the 2017 Discovery Young Upcoming Health Journalist award. She previously worked as researcher for the Rhodes University Centre for Health Journalism and the Health Economics and Epidemiology Research Office at Wits.
Article first published here by the Daily Maverick on the 5th February 2021. Reproduced with kind permission.
Image: Robot of the Final Spring, Barrydale 2019. Courtesy of Handspring Puppet Company and Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape.