05/09/2026
Josh has been musing about people and technology his whole life, he grew up with a 14.4K modem whistling in the background of home movies, messing around on bulletin boards and gopher holes on his personal computers, and had to compile his own Web browser in college.
He has a PhD in Anthropology with a doctoral minor in Computer Science, which may surprise people, but when you think of all the kinds of information archaeologists have to deal with (pottery styles, metrics of collapsed buildings, species and elements of animal bones, forms and metals of coins, all the stone tools, chemical and biological residues, magnetic fields and lasers for measurements, ancient art and writing, et cetera) then you see that databases are the only way they can keep anything straight.
In 2012 he founded a project called the Digital Index of North American Archaeology (do a web search for D-I-N-A-A) which is the world's largest completely free and open index of archaeological site information available to professionals and the public alike.
Making all these connections about past human behavior and past human technologies using computer-networked information has led Josh to do a lot of thinking about how technology has shaped humanity and vice versa in our evolutionary journey (look at your shirt, that's technology, so is a stone tool, so is an AI Large Language model).
At IU South Bend, Josh has a joint appointment between the programs of Anthropology and Informatics, which lets him get away with all this stuff.
In the past year he's published two articles on the ways AI is changing social orders and scientific practice, and the ways people are dealing with that, and he's helped a lot of people in different countries deal with computer information issues, which leads him to think that many of the problems we suffer from with AI is because AI isn't really democratized at all.
He's a big fan of Free and Open Source Software, his home computer is Linux and he forced his children to learn to use Linux too, he's mostly dumped walled garden social media owned by billionaires for community-supported projects like Mastodon and the Fediverse, and he hopes whatever AI becomes that we use it to help others be more free.
Get your tickets for Dive Into the Future: A Night of 10-Minute Plays and learn more about how Josh’s research influences his views of AI and the arts. Tickets available at https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/ticketing/dive-into-the-future-a-night-of-10-minute-playsv
