Berkeley Talks

When W. Kamau Bell was a child, his mother bought the family a Commodore VIC-20, a popular home computer of the early 1980s. He also had Pong, a ColecoVision and, later, a MiniDisc player. Today, he is still the person his family calls when the TV stops working — and the father who sees technology’s potential to connect his introverted 11-year-old with cousins over FaceTime. “I am not a technophobe,” Bell said at a recent UC Berkeley Journalism event. “If you say, ‘We’re going there, there’s no Wi-Fi,’ I’m not going there.”But Bell — a comedian, filmmaker and author known for using humor to examine race and American culture — also said technology’s growing presence does not mean people should unquestioningly hand over their language or creativity to artificial intelligence. Bell was joined by UC Berkeley Journalism Dean Michael D. Bolden on Aug. 26 for a conversation at the AI, Journalism and Public Trust Symposium, sponsored by UC Berkeley Journalism and the Pulitzer Center. During the discussion,