Our weekly SRI Seminar Series welcomes Beth Simone Noveck, a professor at Northeastern University, where she directs the Burnes Center for Social Change and its partner projects, the GovLab, and InnovateUS. She is core faculty at the Institute for Experiential AI, and serves as Chief Innovation Officer for the state of New Jersey. 

Noveck’s work focuses on using AI to reimagine participatory democracy and strengthen governance, and she has spent her career helping institutions incorporate more participatory and open ways of working. In this talk, she will explore how artificial intelligence can accelerate participatory problem solving initiatives to support democratic institutions.

Talk title: “Unlocking collective intelligence: AI’s role in enhancing democracy”

Abstract:
This conversation will focus on innovative ways of using artificial intelligence to accelerate participatory problem solving and finding practical solutions to pressing issues like election subversion.  We will explore past uses of technology to engage the public in policymaking and why they have failed.  Then we will turn to discussing how generative AI could help us to overcome those challenges and potentially usher in unprecedented opportunities for collaborative decision-making and collective action. The talk will focus on a recent set of experiments we call Smarter Crowdsourcing and the PolicySynth toolkit we have been using to expand the scale and quality of public participation in problem solving.  However, the introduction of generative AI comes with certain risks, above all the danger that artificial intelligence will be used to replace rather than augment human engagement.  The fusion of collective and artificial intelligence presents an exciting opportunity to strengthen democracy and improve institutional governance. It offers the promise of informed decision-making, accelerated problem-solving, and a more inclusive approach to addressing complex issues.  The future of democracy and collective intelligence, however, hinges on our ability to strike a harmonious balance between human wisdom and AI-driven precision.

About Beth Simone Noveck

Beth Simone Noveck is a professor at Northeastern University, where she directs the Burnes Center for Social Change and its partner project, The GovLab. She is faculty at the Institute for Experiential AI, School of Law, and in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities, the College of Arts, Design, and Media, the College of Engineering, and affiliated faculty at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences.

Beth’s work focuses on using AI to reimagine participatory democracy and strengthen governance.

Among her many civic technology projects, she created Unchat, one of the first online platforms for democratic engagement, and Peer-to-Patent to connect scientists to policymakers to improve the patent process. Two decades before the Metaverse, she built Democracy Island in Second Life.

Previously, Beth served in the White House as the first United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer under President Obama. She founded the White House Open Government Initiative, which created policies and platforms, such as data.gov and challenge.gov, for making the federal government more transparent, participatory, and collaborative. In 2020, Beth designed Ask a Scientist to crowdsource answers to COVID questions.

Appointed the State of New Jersey’s first Chief Innovation Officer in 2018, Beth and her team are using new technology to improve equitable government delivery of services.

In addition to her current courses on AI for Impact, Beth is the founder of open, online courses such as Solving Public Problems for social innovators in over 100 countries, Open Justice for legal innovators, and InnovateUS for public sector professionals. The author of three earlier books, Beth’s newest book is Democracy Rebooted: Unleashing the Power of AI.

About the SRI Seminar Series

The SRI Seminar Series brings together the Schwartz Reisman community and beyond for a robust exchange of ideas that advance scholarship at the intersection of technology and society. Seminars are led by a leading or emerging scholar and feature extensive discussion.