Speakers

• Professor Daphna Joel — Tel Aviv University
• Professor Haiqing Yu — RMIT University
• Mary Doyle-Kent — South East Technological University

Abstract

As artificial intelligence becomes embedded in everyday decision-making, communication, learning, and work, it is not merely simulating aspects of human cognition. Increasingly, it is becoming part of the environment that shapes how people think, pay attention, learn, and act. Through continuous interaction with AI systems, humans adapt to technological environments, raising important questions about cognition, behaviour, and brain plasticity.

But are these effects experienced equally across different groups? AI systems are developed, deployed, and used within social worlds already structured by inequalities and expectations. Patterns of access, use, labour, and exposure vary across populations, shaping how individuals encounter and integrate these technologies into their daily lives.

Bringing together neuroscience and media and communication studies, this conversation explores how AI may be participating in the production of human difference. Drawing on Daphna Joel's pioneering work challenging binary notions of "male" and "female" brains and emphasizing the brain's responsiveness to social and environmental influences, the discussion asks whether AI is becoming a new force in shaping cognitive and behavioural diversity, rather than assuming that any differences in AI use or impact reflect innate characteristics.

While Joel's study focuses on the individual brain, Yu shifts the focus to the social, institutional, and infrastructural levels: from her perspective on platform societies, digital infrastructures, and automated decision-making, AI can be understood as a social institution and cognitive infrastructure that organizes difference through gender, class, race, language, disability, geography, and citizenship. The unequal access to information, visibility, work, and participation is only a sign of the “organised” difference and inequality. This raises critical questions about the need to build AI environments that contest historically contingent inequalities and turn them into productive force to expand people’s agency, dignity, and capacity to participate.

Together, the speakers will explore several key questions: at the individual level, how might sustained interaction with AI alter attention, learning, and cognitive habits? At the collective level, do AI systems reinforce existing social inequalities and categories, including gender, or create new forms of differentiation? And how can societies design technologies that support human flourishing without reproducing restrictive assumptions about sex, gender, ability, or identity?

At stake is a broader question about the future relationship between technology and human development: as AI increasingly participates in shaping the environments that shape us, what kinds of minds, behaviours, and social realities are we creating, and for whom?

Looking for more in the field?

Explore more events from Breaking Barriers for Gender Rights and Justice through Research and Springer Nature's Springer Nature SDG Talks.