The theme of the Artificiality Summit 2026 is Unknowing. We start with five speakers—David Wolpert, Caleb Scharf, Wakanyi Macharia-Hoffman, Gašper Beguš, and Nina Beguš—whose work converges on a single finding: the uncertainty surrounding AI is permanent, not a phase.
Helen Edwards is a Co-Founder of Artificiality. She previously co-founded Intelligentsia.ai (acquired by Atlantic Media) and worked at Meridian Energy, Pacific Gas & Electric, Quartz, and Transpower.
In this episode, I have the pleasure of interviewing Chelsea Barabas a PhD candidate at MIT’s Media Lab. We talk about her work on bias in the criminal justice system as well as her most recent work applying the concept of “studying up” from anthropology to the data science world.
A growing cadre of academics, activists, technologists, lawyers, and designers are confronting biases and attempting to understand and mitigate them. The attempt to grapple with AI bias will force us to confront the biases in ourselves.
Paradoxically, the prediction of our future selves reduces our ability to freely find those selves. The younger we are, the more pernicious this effect may be. Perhaps the ultimate protection we can give our kids is the right to figure themselves out before an AI does it for them.
