Join Beth Rudden at the Artificiality Summit in Bend, Oregon—October 23-25, 2025—to imagine a meaningful life with synthetic intelligence for me, we and us. Learn more here: www.artificialityinstitute.org/summit
In this thought-provoking conversation, we explore the intersection of archaeological thinking and artificial intelligence with Beth Rudden, former IBM Distinguished Engineer and CEO of Bast AI. Beth brings a unique interdisciplinary perspective—combining her training as an archaeologist with over 20 years of enterprise AI experience—to challenge fundamental assumptions about how we build and deploy artificial intelligence systems.
Beth describes her work as creating "the trust layer for civilization," arguing that current AI systems reflect what Hannah Arendt called the "banality of evil"—not malicious intent, but thoughtlessness embedded at scale. As she puts it, "AI is an excavation tool, not a villain," surfacing patterns and biases that humanity has already normalized in our data and language.
Key themes we explore:
- Archaeological AI: How treating AI as an excavation tool reveals embedded human thoughtlessness, and why scraping random internet data fundamentally misunderstands the nature of knowledge and context
- Ontological Scaffolding: Beth's approach to building AI systems using formal knowledge graphs and ontologies—giving AI the scaffolding to understand context rather than relying on statistical pattern matching divorced from meaning
- Data Sovereignty in Healthcare: A detailed exploration of Bast AI's platform for explainable healthcare AI, where patients control their data and can trace every decision back to its source—from emergency logistics to clinical communication
- The Economics of Expertise: Moving beyond the "humans as resources" paradigm to imagine economic models that compete to support and amplify human expertise rather than eliminate it
- Embodied Knowledge and Community: Why certain forms of knowledge—surgical skill, caregiving, craftsmanship—are irreducibly embodied, and how AI should scale this expertise rather than replace it
- Hopeful Rage: Beth's vision for reclaiming humanist spaces and community healing as essential infrastructure for navigating technological transformation
Beth challenges the dominant narrative that AI will simply replace human workers, instead proposing systems designed to "augment and amplify human expertise." Her work at Bast AI demonstrates how explainable AI can maintain full provenance and transparency while reducing cognitive load—allowing healthcare providers to spend more time truly listening to patients rather than wrestling with bureaucratic systems.
The conversation reveals how archaeological thinking—with its attention to context, layers of meaning, and long-term patterns—offers essential insights for building trustworthy AI systems. As Beth notes, "You can fake reading. You cannot fake swimming"—certain forms of embodied knowledge remain irreplaceable and should be the foundation for human-AI collaboration.
About Beth Rudden: Beth Rudden is CEO and Chairwoman of Bast AI, building explainable artificial intelligence systems with full provenance and data sovereignty. A former IBM Distinguished Engineer and Chief Data Officer, she's been recognized as one of the 100 most brilliant leaders in AI Ethics. With her background spanning archaeology, cognitive science, and decades of enterprise AI development, Beth offers a grounded perspective on technology that serves human flourishing rather than replacing it.
This interview was recorded as part of the lead-up to the Artificiality Summit 2025 (October 23-25 in Bend, Oregon), where Beth will be speaking about the future of trustworthy AI.
