“The Design of AI” Kickoff

Authored by: Dr. Sarah Papazoglakis

As part of the yearlong Technologist-in-Residence programming, the Library is kicking off the Crafting Our Future series with the “The Design of AI” event next week on Wednesday, September 16 from 12:00pm-1:30pm.  Register here.

Reading the Design of Technologies in Automatic Noodle 

We’ll be discussing the novella Automatic Noodle by local Bay Area author Annalee Newitz to frame the discussion of how technologies are designed to shape our adoption and use of new technologies. The novella (available in several formats through the library – it is especially delightful as a 4-hour audiobook) follows four robots in 2064 San Francisco who find themselves working in a third-rate takeout restaurant after being designed for entirely different purposes. Staybehind was built to be a soldier providing combat support. Cayenne was created for search and rescue in military and aid operations. Hands was made to function in a manufacturing assembly line. Sweetie was designed with the most human-like form because she was intended to perform customer service at a bank. 

One of the major themes of the novella is about the design of these machines and the choices made by their manufacturers to make them more appealing to humans, even if they have no functional purpose, like Sweetie’s feminine torso. The robots are designed to be anthropomorphized—given human-like traits. It isn’t until years after they are in use that they become sentient and independent and question the utility of these “unnecessary” human qualities.  

The novella’s attention to anthropomorphication is also a timely inquiry into the metaphors for AI tools that have become common today: assistant, agent, and companion. Attaching human-like traits, emotions, and intentions to non-human objects has a long history–we do this naturally as part of our social instincts.  While this tendency isn’t new, AI is and unlike most objects of the past, AI systems are designed to leverage it; Large Language Models (LLMs) are quite good at mimicking human conversation. The human-like design of LLMs makes the tools easy to use, cultivates trust, and attracts engagement. It also makes critical judgement of its outputs more challenging because it may come across as “reasoned” and "trustworthy", which can lead to undesired outcomes such as accepting inaccurate information or blaming mistakes on AI agents rather than the people and companies that built them.  

Deep Dive into Design with Expert Nina Rastogi 

While discussing Automatic Noodle will help us imagine how the technologies in the next 40 years could be designed, our domain expert, Nina Rastogi, will bring us back to the present. She will guide us in thinking about how design shapes our interactions with AI tools and how we, in turn, can shape the tools of our future. Nina is a writer, content designer, and San José native with a deep background in the humanities and more than a decade of experience at the world's biggest tech companies. 

Imagining and Crafting Our Own Visions of Future Technologies 

Crafting and creative arts form part of the origin story of AI tools today. The first computer programmer, Ada Lovelace established imagination (what she called the "discovering faculty”) as a critical component of technological innovation and computing programming. Lovelace drew from creative arts and textiles to translate a mathematical procedure into a sequence of instructions by using the loom as both a concrete representation of the “Analytical Engine’s” (steam powered programmable computer in 1837) operations and a metaphor for how it worked. 

Lovelace wrote about the origins of zeros and ones of code being based on “the principle of those used in the Jacquard-loom.” The Jacquard loom embodied a binary principle: at each position on a Jacquard card, there is either a hole or a solid card. That principle is historically and conceptually tied to the later logic of digital computation. The Jacquard loom turned pattern into code: holes and solid card became a sequence of mechanical choices that controlled the warp, whose interaction with the weft produced the final pattern. Modern computers perform a similar transformation, turning instructions into sequences of 1s and 0s whose interaction produces computational results.  

Lovelace also drew from the metaphor of weaving to explain how the machine works: “the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.” Weaving and the loom not only directly “influenced early computers,” as Professor Sara Nabil has outlined, “weaving and textile crafts are still influencing how people build technology today.”  

Drawing from this rich history, we invite you to participate in shaping technologies of the future and contributing your vision for the tools that will best serve you and your communities at the kickoff event and future events in the series.  

Sources: 

1. Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz (2025) 
2. “Metaphors of AI indicate that people increasingly perceive AI as warm and human-like” by Myra Cheng and Angela Y Lee, et al. (2026) 
3. “More Than Just a Chatbot? – Why We Keep Treating AI Like a Person, and Why That Might be a Problem!” by Mitja Kara (2025) 
4. “Anthropomorphic AI terms create gaps in accountability” by Brooke Tanner (May 20, 2026) 
5.  Dreaming in Code: Ada Byron Lovelace, Computer Pioneer by Emily Arnold McCully (2019) 
6. Lovelace's writing on imagination and "poetical science," from Ada Byron Lovelace’s notes on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine https://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html (1842) 
7. “How weaving helped invent modern computing — and is shaping its future” by Professor Sara Nabil (2026)