Telling Stories:
On Culturally Responsive
Artificial Intelligence
Edited by
Ryan Calo, Batya Friedman, Tadayoshi Kohno,
Hannah Almeter and Nick Logler
What world—what worlds—will we build with artificial intelligence?
Intended for policymakers, technologists, educators and others, this international collection of 19 short stories delves into AI’s cultural impacts with hesitation and wonder. Authors from Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, India, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, the United States, and elsewhere vividly recount the anticipated influences of AI on love, time, justice, identity, language, trust, and knowledge through the power of narrative.
THE STORIES
Deceptively simple in form, these original stories introduce and legitimate perspectives on AI spanning five continents. Individually and together, they open the reader to a deeper conversation about cultural responsiveness at a time of rapid, often unilateral technological change.
United States of Brazil
Dennys Antonialli, InternetLab, Brazil
Watch Them
Chinmayi Arun, National Law University, Delhi, India
Br’er Rabbit and the Mirror Baby
Joanna Bryson, University of Bath, England
Face Changes
Darren Byler, University of Washington, United States
The Box
Ryan Calo, University of Washington, United States
In Search of Robot Love
Jeff Cao, Tencent Research Institute, China
The Boy Whose Light Went Out
Jack Clark, OpenAI, United States
What Justice
Batya Friedman, University of Washington, United States
True Love?
Sue Glueck, Microsoft, United States
Lia’s AI Future 2036
Sabine Hauert, University of Bristol, England
A Well-Meaning Robot
Alejandro Hevia, University of Chile, Chile
With the Lights Out, It’s Less Dangerous
Ian Kerr, University of Ottawa, Canada
Lost Knowledge? Forbidden Knowledge?
Tadayoshi Kohno, University of Washington, United States
Language Matters
Lisa Nathan, University of British Columbia, Canada
Do We Have the Right Metrics?
Joseph Nkurunziza, Never Again Rwanda, Rwanda
Moussas of the Savanna
Nnenna Nwakanma, World Wide Web Foundation, Côte d’Ivoire
Bug
Amir Rashidi, Center for Human Rights in Iran, Iran
The Goddess
Rohan Samarajiva, LIRNEasia, Sri Lanka
Of Genies and Magic Lamps
Jeroen van den Hoven, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
Telling Stories authors, University of Washington
Seattle, WA, USA, Summer 2018.
About the Global Summit on Culturally Responsive Artificial Intelligence
The Global Summit on Culturally Responsive AI is part of the Tech Policy Lab’s Global Summit Initiative (2016-present). The Global Summits convene twenty to thirty thought leaders from around the world representing design, ethics, governance, policy, and technology. Summits aim to frame and begin progress on pressing grand challenges for tech policy, providing opportunities for collaboration on global and local issues. The 2018 Global Summit structured conversation around grand challenges for developing and disseminating artificial intelligence technologies that maintain respect for and enhance culture and diversity of worldview. Telling Stories: On Culturally Responsive Artificial Intelligence encapsulates the wisdom from these conversations in the form of 19 short stories which can be told and retold.