AI adoption in industry | Absolutely Interdisciplinary 2024

While recent headlines have breathlessly proclaimed that AI technologies are taking over the world of work, the realities of AI adoption in practice are much more nuanced and varied. As history demonstrates, the transformative effects and implications of new technologies often take considerable time—sometimes a generation or more—to be implemented at a system level. However, when these transformations take hold, the results can alter not only the structure of industries and economies but the surrounding culture as well. This session will explore what challenges exist in getting industries to adopt new technologies, and how those challenges can be overcome, emphasizing the need for collaborative research across disciplines and the development of new paradigms and workflows to unlock the potential of AI innovation.

Speakers: Avi Goldfarb (moderator), Kristina McElheran, Christy Prada

About Absolutely Interdisciplinary 2024:
An annual academic conference hosted by the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society, Absolutely Interdisciplinary convenes leading thinkers from a rich variety of fields to engage in conversations that encourage innovation and inspire new insights.

Connecting technical researchers, social scientists, and humanists, Absolutely Interdisciplinary fosters new ways of thinking about the challenges presented by artificial intelligence and other powerful data-driven technologies to build a future that promotes human well-being—for everyone.

Conference participants will contribute to and learn about emerging research areas and new questions to explore. Each session pairs researchers from different disciplines to address a common question and facilitate a group discussion. By identifying people working on similar questions from different perspectives, we will foster conversations that develop the interdisciplinary approaches and research questions needed to understand how AI can be made to align with human values.

About the Schwartz Reisman Institute:
Located at the University of Toronto, the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society’s mission is to deepen our knowledge of technologies, societies, and what it means to be human by integrating research across traditional boundaries and building human-centred solutions that really make a difference. The integrative research we conduct rethinks technology’s role in society, the contemporary needs of human communities, and the systems that govern them. We’re investigating how best to align technology with human values and deploy it accordingly. The human-centred solutions we build are actionable and practical, highlighting the potential of emerging technologies to serve the public good while protecting citizens and societies from their misuse. We want to make sure powerful technologies truly make the world a better place—for everyone.