If you use digital devices, you probably receive many offers of help every day. Help with the next word you might want to write in a message, or with generating a document or an image, or suggestions about what you might buy, watch, study or borrow.

This oration explains how these offers of help are part of a wider invitation for us to recognise AI as history maker. Using examples, it shows how AI makes meaning from past data to make recommendations for the present and the future. It also argues that seeing AI as history maker is important for making better AI technologies and histories. Knowing what histories are written about you and others, and knowing how those histories can be made is critical for social and economic health.

Distinguished Professor Marnie Hughes-Warrington AO PFHEA B.Ed (Hons) Tas, DPhil Oxon
is a graduate of the Universities of Tasmania and Oxford and has a global profile as a philosopher and as a historian.