On Sabbatical: Ecological Beloning
- 8 hours ago
- 2 min read
This period marks the fulfillment of 4 years as member of the Staatscommissie tegen Discriminatie en Racisme, 5 as group leader SIAS | Socially Intelligent Artificial Systems Group, 6 as scientific director of the Civic AI Lab, 7 as director of the Master Information Studies at the UvA Faculty of Science. These coincide with a decade of work focused on AI for social and public good, making it good moment to take a sabbatical, recharge and rethink what comes next.
Academically, I tend to move on to new frontiers roughly every decade, when the fields I work in become saturated. From 1995 to 2005, I focused on building AI systems for computer vision and diagnostic radiology. Between 2005 and 2015, I shifted to using AI to study neural systems, with an emphasis on brain decoding and human vision. From 2015 to 2025, I expanded into social systems, focusing on algorithmic bias and fair AI systems.
Now it is time again to broaden my scope and push toward ecological systems. This is not a deviation from my earlier work, but a natural progression: from neural systems, to social systems, and now to ecological ones. AI is reaching a point where we can generalize and materialize Gibson’s ecological approach of not asking what is inside complex adaptive systems – such as brains and societies - but what these systems are embedded within.
Human societies exist within complex ecosystems of living (e.g. animals, plants) and non-living systems (e.g. minerals, weather). Understanding these ecosystems can enrich human societies as well as lead to more stable, ecologically informed AI. AI that is less determined and constrained by tendencies of human and societal self-centeredness, self-deception and self-destructiveness, as emerging particularly in the West.
I am therefore planning to explore non-Western and non-human forms of intelligence, and how intercultural, intergenerational, and interspecies prosociality can enrich AI and vice versa. The most natural place for me to begin this exploration is Africa: its rich and still underrecognized forms of ecological intelligence and wisdom, as well as the dynamic and creative youth population, offer possibilities for fundamentally reimagining and shaping AI.
From September - December 2026, I will travel across Africa - visiting places from Nairobi to Johannesburg - and engage with diverse communities, learn from African perspectives on ecological belonging and coexistence, rethink research and education, and build lasting collaborations with civil society, philanthropic organizations, and emerging initiatives like Deep Learning Indaba and The Wellbeing Project’s Ecological Belonging (video).
If you would like to exchange ideas or explore collaborations on AI and Ecological Belonging, feel free to reach out.
Comments