Anthropologists have their eye on AI

December 04, 2025

Anthropologists have their eye on AI, as a key emerging topic.  As early as 2022, UVic anthropologist Brian Thom spoke to the potential of AI and machine learning systems to augment Indigenous governments’ work in future-making at the 2022 Royal Anthropological Institute Anthropology and AI meetings. 

In November, Canada's Anthropology in Praxis network hosted an online panel on Applying Anthropology in an AI World  where Thom spoke on emergent issues like the emerging possibilities of AI in our work as anthropologists, how AI changes the value of anthropology going forward, and how anthropologists can contribute to an AI world.

While there are many important spaces of concern--some of which are profoundly difficult to fully address--AI has become not only a subject of theoretical development (ie: machine ontologies, the nature of the human) and socio-cultural enquiry (what are the implications of engaging AI), but also, in the anthropologists’ toolkit, as a means to facilitate analysis, insight and discovery. Thom has been invited to present a new work currently titled, “The Secret Sauce of Sovereignty: Relational AI and the Project of Indigenous Future-Building,” at the Max Planck Institute in Germany next year for a symposium titled: AI in Context: Plural Perspectives and Practices on Governance and Justice.