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.
Noveck’s work focuses on using AI to reimagine participatory democracy and strengthen governance, and she has spent her career helping institutions incorporate more equitable and open ways of working using new technology.
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, Noveck 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, Noveck designed Ask a Scientist to crowdsource answers to COVID questions.
She served as senior advisor for Open Government for UK Prime Minister David Cameron, and between 2018-2021, she served on Chancellor Angela Merkel's Digital Council.
Appointed the State of New Jersey’s first Chief Innovation Officer by Governor Phil Murphy, Noveck and her team are using new technology to improve equitable government delivery of services. The Office of Innovation has worked with partner agencies to modernize unemployment insurance, provide a whole-of-government response to COVID, collect real-time infection data, deliver everything needed to start, run and grow a business, and use open data to provide training information to job seekers and improve uptake of benefits, services and permits. She also served as Chair of the State's Future of Work Task Force.
In addition to her current course on AI for Impact, Noveck 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, including Solving Public Problems: How to Fix Our Government and Change Our World (Yale Press, 2021) (named a Best Book of 2021 by Stanford Social Innovation Review), Noveck’s newest book is Democracy Rebooted: Unleashing the Power of AI.
She was named one of the “Foreign Policy 100” by Foreign Policy, one of Fast Company’s “100 Most Creative People in Business”, a “Top Women in Technology” by Huffington Post, and one of the World's 100 Most Influential Academics in Government by Apolitical. She was awarded the doctorat honoris causa from the University of Geneva in October 2023. Her TED talk is here, and she tweets @bethnoveck.
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.
Each week, a featured speaker will present for 45 minutes, followed by an open discussion. Registered attendees will be emailed a Zoom link before the event begins. The event will be recorded and posted online.
Beth Simone Noveck