In the Drupal community, we're contending with a rapidly changing near term and far future that have immense, even unsettling, implications for our ecosystem. This year's advent of generative artificial intelligence (AI), including OpenAI's emerging integrations with Drupal, and the fast growth in voice and other conversational technologies, cast in stark relief the risks and rewards—and the dangers to our commitments to equity, inclusion, and an open web—of allowing machines to become more human. At the same time, advancements in immersive technologies like the putative metaverse raise pertinent and urgent questions about what happens when humans become more like machines. Things feel unbalanced, unhinged, and unstable.
Over the course of this keynote, we'll touch on all of these areas: conversational, immersive, and generative—and we'll look at their possible impacts on the Drupal community and ecosystem as well as the potential damage they might inflict on our sense of humanity, our sense of justice, and our sense of self. We'll look closely at topics like avatars, anthropomorphism, and AI bias to explore how our imminent future encodes oppression into our interfaces as they become more like us and reflect our society, and to inspect why we must confront difficult questions in order to keep Drupal relevant, resonant, and reliable far into the future—for everyone.
