Making not Breaking: A Cybernetic Approach to Responsible AI Design

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As part of RLUK’s Digital Shift Forum, Ellen Broad, Senior Fellow, School of Cybernetics, Australian National University, and author of Made by Humans: The AI Condition, spoke on a cybernetic approach to responsible AI design. Under the title of ‘Making not breaking’, she outlined approaches to engineering responsible AI systems, drawing on reinvigorated cybernetic concepts. Describing cybernetics as the trans-disciplinary mid 20th century movement from which AI and computer science emerged, the presentation considers an organising framework through which to reconsider how we build, maintain and use AI systems. Drawing on not only the technological elements comprising AI systems, but their human and ecological elements, cybernetics is argued as a means of reimagining the way we engineer AI today and the role it plays in our future.