Interview James Wright

INTERVIEW
Interview of James WRIGHT (The Alan Turing Institute)

Dr James Wright is a Research Associate at The Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national institute for data science and AI, where he works on PATH-AI: Mapping an Intercultural Path to Privacy, Agency, and Trust in Human-AI Ecosystems, a joint project with RIKEN, Japan’s largest comprehensive research institution. The project studies the values of privacy, agency, and trust from a comparative and intercultural perspective looking at both Japan and the UK, with an initial focus on digital contact tracing apps used during the COVID-19 pandemic. James’ PhD in anthropology and science and technology studies (STS) at the University of Hong Kong, completed in 2018, looked at the development and attempted implementation of care robots in Japan, and involved 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Japan. This work formed the basis of his upcoming book, due to be published in 2021 by Cornell University Press. Before joining The Alan Turing Institute, James was a Research Associate on the Sustainable Care programme at the University of Sheffield, where he examined how digital technologies are transforming adult social care in the UK, and what potential they hold for the future. He was also a postdoctoral fellow at the Fondation France-Japon, part of the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris, where he worked on a comparative study of Japanese and European publicly funded care robot projects.

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Research themes: The ethics of AI in the UK and Japan, the development and use of robots for adult social care.