Schedule

• Thursday April 10

  Lee C. Bollinger Forum and online

  601 W 125th St, New York, NY 10027

   

  9:30AM – 12:00AM EDT

  Welcome

  • Jameel Jaffer, Knight Institute

  9:45AM – 10:45AM EDT

  Panel 1: Regulating AI in a Time of Democratic Upheaval

  Liberal democracies had almost reached consensus on how to regulate narrow AI when ChatGPT came along and general purpose AI took center stage. How should regulatory proposals adapt to this new reality—and what prospects are there for effective regulation when the global geopolitical order is being reconfigured?

  Panelists

  • Atoosa Kasirzadeh, Carnegie Mellon University
  • Deirdre K. Mulligan, University of California, Berkeley
  • Arvind Narayanan, Princeton University
  • Alondra Nelson, Institute for Advanced Study

  Moderator

  • To be announced.

  10:55AM – 11:10AM EDT

  Break

  11:10AM – 12:20PM EDT

  Panel 2: AI Agents’ Democratic and Economic Impacts

  The most consequential societal impacts of large language models will come not through the content they generate but through the cognitive resources they provide to effective software agents. This panel considers how these agents in turn will reconfigure political and economic realities.

  Panelists

  • Kevin Feng, University of Washington
  • Peter Henderson, Princeton University
  • Seth Lazar, Knight Institute; The Australian National University
  • Daniel Susskind, King’s College London

  Moderator

  • Beba Cibralic, RAND 

   

  12:20PM – 1:00PM EDT

  Lunch

  Lunch will be provided.

  1:00PM – 2:00PM EDT

  Keynote Address and Q&A

  • Ben Buchanan, Johns Hopkins University

  2:00PM – 2:15PM EDT

  Break

  2:15PM – 3:25PM EDT

  Panel 3: Evaluation and Design of Safe AI

  Advances in large language models were enabled by, and fostered, a boom in technical AI safety research. But narrowly technical approaches not only mischaracterize AI risks, they miss key opportunities for mitigating them. This panel fosters a more multidisciplinary, sociotechnical approach to technical AI safety.

  Panelists

  • Gillian Hadfield, Johns Hopkins University
  • Hoda Heidari, Carnegie Mellon University
  • Lujain Ibrahim, University of Oxford
  • Sydney Levine, Allen Institute for AI

  Moderator

  • Helen Toner, Georgetown University

   

  3:25PM – 3:40PM EDT

  Break

  3:40PM – 4:50PM EDT

  Panel 4: Using AI to Enhance Democracy

  Democratic freedoms are imperiled by affective polarization and radicalization. This panel explores how AI can, and cannot, be used to forge agreement or even consensus in formal and informal democratic deliberation.

  Panelists

  • Spencer Overton, George Washington University
  • MH Tessler, Google DeepMind
  • Luke Thorburn, King’s College London
  • Additional panelist to be announced.

  Moderator

  • To be announced.

  4:50PM – 5:00PM EDT

  Closing Remarks

• Friday April 11

  Lee C. Bollinger Forum and online

  601 W 125th St, New York, NY 10027

  9:30AM – 9:45AM EDT

  Welcome

  9:45AM – 10:55AM EDT

  Panel 5: Reframing AI in the Digital Public Sphere

  Democracies depend on a vibrant public sphere. No social institution has been more shaped by narrow AI than the digital public sphere—by most accounts, to its detriment. This panel asks if more capable general purpose AI systems can do better.

  Panelists

  • Sacha Altay, University of Zurich
  • Joshua P. Darr, Syracuse University
  • Manon Revel, Meta FAIR
  • Ranjit Singh, Data & Society

  Moderator

  • Nadine Farid Johnson, Knight Institute

  10:55AM – 11:10AM EDT

  Break

  11:10AM – 12:20PM EDT

  Panel 6: AI, Freedom of Expression, and Democratic Backsliding

  As large language models become more and more integrated into the information environment, alignment techniques designed to limit AI companies’ exposure to liability and public embarrassment are affecting the expressive interests of model users (including jailbreakers). At the same time, the community of research on AI risks is facing unprecedented political intervention into the content and methods of its research. All this is happening at a moment of rising authoritarianism and democratic backsliding. This panel asks how to square the values of safe AI with core principles of freedom of expression—preserving expressive interests against both private and state control.

  Panelists

  • Aziz Huq, University of Chicago Law School 
  • More panelists to be announced.

  Moderator

  • Katy Glenn Bass, Knight Institute

  12:20PM – 1:00PM EDT

  Lunch

  1:00PM – 2:00PM EDT

  Keynote Address and Q&A

  • Keynote speaker to be announced.

  2:00PM – 2:15PM EDT

  Break

  2:15PM – 3:25PM EDT

  Panel 7: Transitions to Transformative AI

  Even if AI capabilities stalled out at their present level, the societal ramifications would be massive. But if progress continues at roughly the same pace, we may be dealing with even more profoundly transformative AI systems within the decade. This panel seeks to get on the front foot—to characterize what ‘transformative AI’ would mean, how it would differ from what has been realized so far, and how to develop societal resilience to the potential for further radical social change.

  Panelists

  • Justin Bullock, University of Washington
  • Rumman Chowdhury, Humane Intelligence
  • Séb Krier, Google DeepMind
  • Additional panelist to be announced.

  Moderator

  • Seth Lazar, Knight Institute; The Australian National University

   

  3:25PM – 3:30PM EDT

  Closing Remarks