It's TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hu. So much of how we understand the world comes down to

questions because questions help frame ideas. In her talk at Ted Salon in 2020, anthropologist

Genevieve Bell tackles the coming artificial intelligence or AI revolution with questions.

She explains what we should be thinking about

as AI scales and how a new system of automation is created for the world. Let me tell you a story

about artificial intelligence. There's a building in Sydney at No. 1, Bly Street. It houses lots of government departments

and busy people. From the outside, it looks like something out of American science fiction.

All gleaming glass and curved lines and a piece of orange sculpture. On the inside, it has

excellent coffee on the ground floor and my favourite lifts in Sydney. They're beautiful. They look

almost alive. And it turns out I'm fascinated with lifts for lots of reasons, but because lifts are

one of the places you can see the future. In the 21st century, lifts are interesting because they're

one of the first places that AI will touch you without you even knowing it happened.

In many buildings, all around the world, the lifts are running a set of algorithms, a form of

proto-artificial intelligence. That means before you even walk up to the lift to press the button,

it's anticipated you being there. It's already rearranging all the carriages, always going

down to save energy and to know where the traffic's going to be. By the time you've actually

pressed the button, you're already part of an entire system that's making sense of people

and the environment and the building and the built world. I know when we talk about AI, we often talk about a world of robots.

It's easy for our imaginations to be occupied with science fiction, well, of the last hundred

years. I say AI and you think, the Terminator. Somewhere for us making the connection between

AI and the built world, that's a harder story to tell.

But the reality is AI is already everywhere around us and in many places.

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