She’s the professor who grew up in central Australia wearing no shoes. As an anthropologist, she expected to become a career academic. Instead, she is one of the world’s pre-eminent futurists and technologists, and in February Professor Genevieve Bell kicked off the Newington Centre for Ethics 2018 speaker series.

Addressing the hot topic of robots and artificial intelligence, Professor Bell urged the crowd in the packed Old Boys Lecture Theatre to think about the world they want to live in. What does it mean to be human in a world where change is happening before we have even considered what it might mean?

Professor Bell’s career has been spent putting the human element back into technology. As Vice-President of global tech giant Intel, her role involved “looking beyond what’s technically possible”, focusing instead on what people care about.

In her current role as Director of the 3A Institute at the Australian National University, she is part of a team “trying to make sense of what’s coming”.

“AI is the steam engine but we don’t even know what the train is yet,” she said.

Her wide-ranging talk covered everything from the origin of the word ‘robot’ (it was a made-up word that first appeared in Czech writer Karel Capek’s science fiction play RUR – Rossum’s Universal Robots – in 1921) to the importance of feeding algorithms data sets that will improve the world, not just reflect what the world has been to this point.

She pondered why so many people find Boston Dynamic’s headless, door-opening robot ‘dog’ creepy, yet think nothing of robotic vacuum cleaners that have the capacity to map homes and make personal data available to the highest bidder.

Morality, ethics, belief systems and autonomy all featured, but it was the questions we should ask about digital technology that proved central to her session.

What does it mean to have things doing their own bidding? What are the limits of autonomy? Do robots have an inner life, and if they do, what does it look like? What creates it? Does artificial intelligence develop a series of beliefs? What worlds will be created inside objects? As humans, what do we own? Our data? Our bodies? How far are we prepared to let technology go?

“You have responsibilities when you make things,” Professor Bell said. “Society needs to be clear about what it values. We can make decisions about the world we create.

“We have to think beyond efficiency and productivity and think about happiness instead.”

Future Centre for Ethics talks will include journalist Peter Greste on why the war on journalism matters, Stan Grant on Australia’s relationship with its indigenous people and Dr Caroline West on the philosophy of happiness.