The woman put in charge of leading a 10-year revolution in artificial intelligence at one of the nation's top universities says the technology industry needs to embrace diversity.

Professor Genevieve Bell, who previously spent two decades as vice-president at Intel, says all Australians have a part to play in ensuring the robots of the future have "Australian values".

Trained as an anthropologist, she has now returned to work at the Australian National University and will lead research on the intersection of tech innovation and human experiences.

Given the lack of diversity in the global technology sector, part of Professor Bell's new role will involve steering innovation away from the hands of the increasingly few, or else risk alienating entire groups of consumers.

"It feels like it's a huge task. I've spent the last 20 years in Silicon Valley building and working on teams that were making the future, and one of the biggest challenges there was always about how do you find a diversity of experience," Professor Bell said.

"The biggest danger is that [companies] build technology for themselves and not for others."

She said innovation needed to be driven with a better understanding of how and by whom a technology will be used, recalling an example from her days at Intel.

"My colleagues had built this really remarkable piece of equipment, which was basically a desktop CPU stack and then put it into the living room and it had a fan and it whirred," she said.

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"I remember looking at this particular set of colleagues and saying, 'Have you ever watched television?' They all just sort of looked at me and went, 'But we don't watch TV'.

In another instance, Professor Bell said, Apple released the Apple Watch, a smart technology that can measure the wearer's health and fitness.

"When Apple released their most recent smart watch they had a software developer kit for how you could build things for that watch," she said.

"And yet that kit did not have anything for tracking menstruation — [which] was described as a 'niche usage'."

Australia ready to take leading role in tech industry

Professor Bell said Australia was well positioned to regain its leading role in the technology industry as a whole.

"One of the really interesting things when you look at the history of technology, and particularly the history of computing, is how instrumental Australia was in the very early days," Professor Bell said.

"There's an opportunity here to put ourselves back in the middle of the conversation about what the future of technology looks like — frankly, I think artificial intelligence is just the first piece of that.

"There is a huge opportunity to think about how to do that in a way that manifests classic Australian values like fairness and equity and social justice."

As prominent scientists like Stephen Hawking warn AI could spell end of humanity, Professor Bell cautioned against alarmism on the matter.

"I think the most interesting thing about those fears is how long they've been around and where their historical roots are," she said.

"Human beings have feared things that were like us but not quite like us for a very long time, and the fear of AI has its roots in everything from the golem stories to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein."

Professor Bell will be presenting this year's Boyer Lectures, to be broadcast on ABC RN in October. Her series is called Fast, smart and connected: Can we be Australian in a digital world?

