I've Got Questions with Sinead Bovell - What type of artist will AI invent?

Episode Date: August 11, 2026

We often underestimate the role artists have played in technological history. Again and again, technologies invented to solve practical problems were transformed by artists into entirely new ways of seeing, creating and experiencing the world. In the process, artists didn’t just change what those technologies were used for. They helped shape how society saw itself through those inventions, and how it understood the moment it was living through. Artificial intelligence is arriving largely through the language of work, productivity and science. But if history tells us anything, the way we come to see ourselves through this technology may ultimately be shaped by artists, and by the new forms of expression they invent with it. This talk took place at the Aspen Institute's Shared Futures Forum, co-hosted by the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation. Follow my work here: Website: https://www.sineadbovell.com Substack: https://sineadbovell.substack.com/ Instagram: / sineadbovell LinkedIn: / sineadbovell Twitter / X: / sineadbovell YouTube: / sineadbovell TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/sineadbovell

Hi everybody, good morning. It is such a privilege to be able to kick off shared futures with you today and the agenda ahead. It's really exciting and I'm looking forward to jumping in on that side. My name is Shane Bovel and I am a futurist and I know my slides are titled Technology Humanity in the road ahead, but I'm actually going to send us into the past for a little bit to see if history can tell us anything about the shape of what might be coming next. And I want to start with a question. Why is this? is that when we think about writing, right, one of humanity's great inventions and the ways in which it transformed our world, our history, how we relate to one another, ourselves, our childhood, that we think of names like this, right? Lao Tzu, Shakespeare, James Baldwin. If you're a history buff, you'll probably recognize the name in the top left, who historians believe was one of the humanities first authors thousands of years ago. And I could have had many more slides of these types of names.

Why do we think of these people when we think about the invention of writing and we don't think about accounting? And I don't work for the IRS, I promise. But this is why writing was invented. And not just once, multiple places independently throughout the world, writing was invented for accounting, as a database to keep track, to tell us what we owned, what we owed, what we valued, and what we exchanged. But it wasn't until writing.

entered the hands of the philosopher, the poet, the storyteller, the word we would eventually call the author, that writing began to tell us something else. I started to tell us what we feared and what we loved, what we believed, what we imagined, and what we wanted to be remembered for. The artist teaches us how to see ourselves through the technologies that we invent. Artists look at a technical capability. And they think about it through a cultural question. What do types of memories, imagination, feeling can be made possible with this technology that were impossible before? And we see this time and time again, right? The study of art and the history of art is also the history of technology. They are inextricably linked, an artist and their tools. It's a symbiotic relationship.

You can look at the history of technology and you can see what civilized needed, what they were trying to make possible. And you can look at the history of art, and you can come to see how we came to recognize ourselves and what became possible. But the transformation I'm interested in is when a technology arrives, it arrives with an assignment, right, a certain language, whether that's to count,

to store, to transfer, to analyze, to generate. But artists don't accept that original assignment. They pose a new set of questions, right? What type of human experience can move through this technology? What else can this technology hold? And they develop a new language unique to that technology. And we see this time and time again. Who recognizes this device?

A few hands, great. This is what Thomas Edison would have called an apparatus for recording and repurposing the human voice, also known as the phonograph. And his vision for this device, it should be no surprise. We're going to start to see a trend here, was for the business world. And he thought that this would be a way

to record dictations in the office, or whatever they would have called it then. And then some secondary markets, maybe we could have dolls that speak. We could record the voices of dying loved ones. He had music somewhere up there, but didn't really see that that's kind of where this is going to end up. The problem was it was a terrible business device.

Businesses refused to lease it. It was really finicky. The audio was terrible. So all of the entrepreneurs that went on to found phonograph companies had to pivot. Most went bankrupt, but a few pivoted. One in particular, Lewis Glass. He started to outfit the phonograph with a little coin machine, and the nickel and slot was born. And if you happen to be lucky to be at a bar where this machine existed, you could put in five cents, and you could listen to what was recorded for it.

The challenges, what was recorded for it was very limited, right? You might hear some people whistling, some marching bands, some spoken word, but you couldn't just listen to music. Why? This wasn't music's natural form, right? This wasn't music's natural language. It had all sorts of technical constraint. It could only be three minutes and 20 seconds. Prior to that, songs could unfold however long the magician believed the ballot needed to unfold over. It couldn't be too high or too low in the pitch because it would distort the audio. And up until that point, music, music had never been decoupled from the musician. It was one. Music was live, right? It was participatory. It was for churches and streets and venues. The artist and the music were together. So this posed

a unique artistic challenge. How do you create intimacy through a machine? And do we see any parallels in the moment we're in today? That was a question before the musician. How do you make somebody feel something in three minutes and 20 seconds. And how do you make somebody feel something? And for the first time, you won't be there as they're experiencing it. What type of art is that? And musicians answered this not by simply repurposing live music or by cutting a ballot in half, but by inventing a new language for recorded sound. The recorded song. It was intimate, compressed, repeatable, and most importantly, built to live beyond the room in which it was made. And we're not confined to these constraints anymore, but we still oblige by them, right?

Because the three-minute-and-twenty-second form factor became one of the most compelling forms in our modern culture. And the final example I'm going to give before we head to the present and then the future is the motion picture camera, what we came to call the video camera. And this one might actually be my favorite. When you read the historical records of what this technology was invented for and what they imagined, right? The inventors, the entrepreneurs, it was one of historical documentation. We could finally, for the first time, record reality.

This would be a new way to record history. There were some aspects of entertainment that they envisioned, such as this image. And this is actually one of the most iconic. This was a turning point in the world of what became film. These were images of people leaving a factory. They turned it into motion. People got to come and watch that. They saw it as a miracle.

I think today we would see this as surveillance. But at the time, this was a miracle. And then they thought another form factor could be we could record live plays. But that's not what the artist did. Artists invented a new language for the camera, what we came to call movies. A new type of perspective. a new type of script, new types of roles, the rise of the cinematographer. So where are we in this moment? Artificial intelligence, at least in its latest form,

has arrived largely again through the language of work, the business. We hear a lot about efficiency, productivity, what this means for the future of the company. Is there a future of the company? We also, of course, hear from the scientists and the technologists, what this technology will mean for science, for societal capacity, for a civilizational capacity, right? The same types of questions we've heard before. But we know now, if history tells us anything, that there's another transformation underway. And one that may ultimately be the transformation that society comes to remember. And think about how extraordinary this is, right?

All of the ways we talk about AI today, what it is, what it isn't, what it's going to bring us, what it could take from us. And there's this parallel world where artists are inventing a new language for this technology that may be the defining way that we come to see ourselves in this technology. In the same way, we see ourselves through literature when we think about writing, not accounting. And we're starting to see the signals of it today, right, artists exploring with this technology, stretching it, redefining it on their own terms, and we'll see many examples of that today. But if we know, historically, that the inventions of technology also lead to a new type of artist, right? We have the author, the playwright, the painter, director, the musician, photographer, cinematographer.

What type of artist might AI invent? And so if we want to understand where the future is going, follow the artist. Right? That is the direction that humanity follows. And as a futurist, I can't predict exactly where we end up and exactly where this goes, but I can tell you where I think we are. The camera has been invented. Movies have not.

Thank you so much and enjoy the day.