Human machines and machine humans

prestonso — Thu, 18 May 2023 21:02:27 +0000

Room

HS1 (Ground level)

prestonso Thu, 05/18/2023 - 23:02

Time Slot

Thu 9:15am to 10:15am (7/20/23)

Session length

Long session - 45min, including Q&A

Audience

All Attendees

Session Category

Innovation & The future

In the Drupal community, we're contending with a rapidly changing near term and far future that have immense, even unsettling, implications for our ecosystem. This year's advent of generative artificial intelligence (AI), including OpenAI's emerging integrations with Drupal, and the fast growth in voice and other conversational technologies, cast in stark relief the risks and rewards—and the dangers to our commitments to equity, inclusion, and an open web—of allowing machines to become more human. At the same time, advancements in immersive technologies like the putative metaverse raise pertinent and urgent questions about what happens when humans become more like machines. Things feel unbalanced, unhinged, and unstable.

Over the course of this keynote, we'll touch on all of these areas: conversational, immersive, and generative—and we'll look at their possible impacts on the Drupal community and ecosystem as well as the potential damage they might inflict on our sense of humanity, our sense of justice, and our sense of self. We'll look closely at topics like avatars, anthropomorphism, and AI bias to explore how our imminent future encodes oppression into our interfaces as they become more like us and reflect our society, and to inspect why we must confront difficult questions in order to keep Drupal relevant, resonant, and reliable far into the future—for everyone.

Speaker(s)

Preston So

Author of Immersive Content and Usability from A Book Apart

Speaker biography

Preston So (he/they) is a product, design, engineering, and innovation leader, digital architect and strategist, designer and developer advocate, polyglot educator and speaker, and author of Immersive Content and Usability (A Book Apart, 2023), Gatsby: The Definitive Guide (O’Reilly, 2021), Voice Content and Usability (A Book Apart, 2021), and Decoupled Drupal in Practice (Apress, 2018). He has been a programmer since 1999, a web developer and designer since 2001, a creative professional since 2004, a content architect since 2007, and a conversational and immersive designer since 2016.

A globally recognized authority on the intersections of content, design, and code, Preston has been a product, design, engineering, and innovation leader since 2015 at organizations like Oracle, Acquia, Time Inc., and Gatsby. Preston is an editor at A List Apart, columnist at CMSWire, contributor to Smashing Magazine, and has delivered keynotes around the world in three languages. He is based in New York City, where he can often be found immersing himself in languages that are endangered or underserved.