In 2020 and 2021, Professor Sarah Dillon co-led an interdisciplinary Andrew W. Mellon Sawyer Seminar on the Histories of AI (HOAI). The Mellon Foundation’s Sawyer Seminars were established in 1994 to provide support for comparative research on the historical and cultural sources of contemporary developments.

The HOAI Sawyer Seminar developed an interpretive community capable of offering a structural, historical perspective on the promises and problematics of AI and machine learning. This new community included scholars from a variety of fields including historians of science and technology, and scholars from decolonial studies and critical theory, such as race, gender, and disability studies. The community engaged in critical and comparative research on the historical and cultural sources of contemporary developments in AI technologies to investigate their entanglement in systems of politics, power and control. Four themes guided the Seminar’s considerations: hidden labour, encoded behaviour, cognitive injustice and disingenuous rhetoric. The Seminar’s activities are archived here, and Sarah reflected on her experience of being involved in the Seminar in the January 2022 edition of 9 West Road (pp. 27-30).

A collection of essays derived from the Seminar’s activities has now been published as the 2023 issue of ‘BJHS Themes’. ‘BJHS Themes’ is a collaborative venture between the British Society for the History of Science and Cambridge University Press aimed at establishing the first fully open access journal for the history of science community. The issue contains 14 articles as well as a substantial introduction by the Seminar core team: Syed Mustafa Ali, Stephanie Dick, Sarah Dillon, Matthew L. Jones, Jonnie Penn and Richard Staley.