Our speaker looks at the dynamic between human and artificial intelligence, tracing the development of AI and its impact on society. She discusses society’s shift toward valuing intellect and explores institutional influences and common concerns such as job loss, ethics, and social fragmentation in an AI-driven world. Drawing parallels between myths and technology, she stresses the essential roles of human intellect, ethics, and cooperation. She views AI as a tool for progress, offers strategies to understand and adapt to AI’s complexities, and emphasizes that humans remain vital to harmonious coexistence with intelligent machines. Her metaphors and stories not only anchor understanding of humans and AI in digital intelligence today, but recognize that things like AI accuracy have always been a concern of digital intelligence and not something unique to AI. She shares insights and ideas for supporting communities in their learning and discovery as they move forward in an AI world.

With a focus on understanding the nature of how people use large and complex collections of information in useful ways to create an attractive, comprehensible, evocative user experience of that information, Russell shares tips on the design of information experience; sensemaking; intelligent agents; knowledge-based assistance; information visualization; multimedia documents; advanced design and development environments; design rationale; planning; intelligent tutoring; hypermedia; and human/computer interfaces. At Google, he developed a practice as a search anthropologist—someone who tries to understand how people search, what kinds of things they seek, and how their tools influence their search process. Since then, he looks more at how people understand AI systems and tools more generally. Hear his thoughts for the future.

Our knowledgeable and engaging speaker is a leader in the information field and shares trends, insights and thoughts on the future landscape.

Our speakers, who have held roles in corporate organizations, developed programs for training library folk and information professionals, experimented with AI, and more, share their ideas on the next generation of libraries. Hear their thoughts on what skills are needed in the library world and how we can build towards a more resilient future.