Please join the History Council of Victoria’s Annual Lecture to be delivered by Distinguished Professor Marnie Hughes-Warrington AO.

The evening will also include the presentation of the History Council of Victoria’s major awards:

Can I help you? If you use digital devices, you probably receive many offers of help every day. Help with the next word you might want to write in a message, or with generating a document or an image, or suggestions about what you might buy, watch, study or borrow. This oration explains how these offers of help are part of a wider invitation for us to recognise AI as history maker. Using examples, it shows how AI makes meaning from past data to make recommendations for the present and the future. It also argues that seeing AI as history maker is important for making better AI technologies, and histories. Knowing what histories are written about you and others, and knowing how those histories can be made is critical for social and economic health.

A graduate of the Universities of Tasmania and Oxford, Marnie has a global profile as a philosopher and as an historian. She is Provost and Chief Academic Officer and Bradley Distinguished Professor at the University of South Australia. Her current work looks at how AI makes histories, and how histories might be made in future which are efficient, safe, and ethical. Her writing has been translated into five languages, over 26,000 copies of her books have been sold, and her theories are taught across the world. She has led or been an investigator on a total of $18 million in grants. Her most recent books are History from Loss (edited with Daniel Woolf, 2023) and The Routledge Companion to History and the Moving Image (edited with Kim Nelson and Mia Treacey, 2023) and she is co-secretary general of the International Commission for the History and Theory of History. In 2022 she was made an Officer in the Order of Australia for her contribution to higher education governance, leadership, and mentoring.