Kevin Driscoll

At CASBS, Kevin Driscoll will be studying how the spread of personal computing shaped the meaning of artificial intelligence during the international AI bubble of the 1980s. Today, AI is portrayed as remote, costly, and obscure. But these characteristics are neither inevitable nor desirable. In 1981, the personal computer seemed poised to bring AI within reach of everyday users. From tech hobbyists and game programmers to media artists and educators, a range of new computer users and firms experimented with expert systems and AI on the desktop. Preceding the Web and big data, this software embodied an alternative understanding of AI as local and participatory. Recovering this moment of possibility in the history of AI may reframe how we think about its futures.

Driscoll is the author of The Modem World: A Prehistory of Social Media (Yale University Press, 2022) and co-author of Minitel: Welcome to the Internet (MIT Press, 2017). He is an associate professor of media studies and co-director of the Humanities AI Lab at the University of Virginia.  Driscoll was a fellow at CASBS in 2020-21.