Dr Kanta Dihal is a Senior Research Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on the portrayals and perceptions of intelligent machines across cultures, and how they help us think about ethics and bias in new technologies. She is currently the Principal Investigator on the Global AI Narratives project, which explores intercultural public understanding of artificial intelligence as constructed by fictional and nonfictional narratives, and the Project Development Lead on Decolonizing AI. From April 2022, she will be managing the LCFI branch of the five-year ‘Desirable Digitalisation’ project, a collaboration between the Universities of Cambridge and Bonn that investigates intercultural perspectives on AI and fundamental rights and values.
Kanta’s work intersects the fields of science communication, literature and science, and science fiction. She obtained her DPhil in science communication at the University of Oxford in 2018: in her thesis, titled 'The Stories of Quantum Physics,' she investigated the communication of conflicting interpretations of quantum physics to adults and children. She is co-editor of the books AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking About Intelligent Machines (2020) and Imagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines (2022) with Oxford University Press, and has co-authored a series of papers on AI narratives with Dr Stephen Cave, including ‘The Whiteness of AI’ (Philosophy and Technology,2020). She has advised bodies including the World Economic Forum, the G20, and the United Nations on portrayals and perceptions of AI.