Weird-shaped tools

Weird-shaped tools Matchbox case: American Airlines 1970s Gift of Thomas G. Dragges Collection of SFO Museum 2014.058.002 Every spring, for the last few years, I have been invited to speak to a class of museum studies students at the University of San Francisco. What follows is this year's talk. It felt, and still feels, like an odd-shaped talk. Did I really want to talk to the class about AI? No, but I did. The topic is sort of inescapable these days both because the marketing campaign which supports it is working in overdrive and because there is clearly something novel that these technologies make possible. From my perspective it's not clear what that is yet but it almost certainly isn't what AI's most ardent supporters think it is. It's definitely not clear that we have settled the accounting (environmental, human and social) that these systems demand. It's complicated and so the goal, more than anything, was to try to demonstrate how the cultural heritage might address this brave…