A New Age of Enlightenment? A New Threat to Humanity?

In a two-pronged Fall 2023 research initiative, Elon University’s Imagining the Digital Future Center completed a U.S. national public opinion poll and a canvassing of more than 300 technology developers, business and policy leaders, researchers, analysts and advocates. It explores the potential impact of AI on individuals’ personal lives and on bedrock aspects of society, such as politics and elections, health care delivery, education and others.

The research findings reveal a wide range of views, with many expressing concerns over serious challenges to human well-being and worry over unprepared human systems, others looking optimistically to great advances in quality of life and a great number in the middle who are uncertain and uneasy about the changes ahead.

Source: ITDF Webpage

Vinton G. Cerf has served as vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google since October 2005. In this role, he contributes to global policy development and continued standardization and spread of the Internet. He is also an active public face for Google in the Internet world.

From 1994 to 2005, Cerf served as the senior vice president of Technology Strategy for MCI. In this role, Cerf was responsible for helping to guide corporate strategy development from the technical perspective. Previously, Cerf served as MCI’s senior vice president of Architecture and Technology, leading a team of architects and engineers to design advanced networking frameworks including Internet-based solutions for delivering a combination of data, information, voice and video services for business and consumer use.

Source: Internet Hall of Fame

Esther Dyson (born 14 July 1951) is a Swiss-born American investor, journalist, author, commentator and philanthropist. She is the executive founder of Wellville, a nonprofit project focused on improving equitable wellbeing.

Dyson is also an angel investor focused on health care, open government, digital technology, biotechnology, and outer space. Dyson’s career now focuses on health and she continues to invest in health and technology startups.

Source: Wikipedia

Dave Edwards is a Co-Founder of the Artificiality Institute.

He previously co-founded Intelligentsia.ai, an artificial intelligence market research firm that was acquired by Atlantic Media. Following the acquisition, he continued his work at Quartz, a subsidiary of Atlantic Media.

Before co-founding Intelligentsia.ai, Dave Edwards worked at companies such as Apple, CRV, Macromedia, Morgan Stanley, and ThinkEquity.

The Artificiality Institute, which Dave Edwards co-founded, is described as a non-profit research organization focused on shaping the human experience in a world increasingly influenced by synthetic intelligence. The institute aims to explore the co-evolution of humans and AI through research, design, and public storytelling.

Tracey Follows is a professional futurist and works with clients on long-term strategies, including Telefonica, Google, Sky, Farfetch, Conde Nast, and Virgin. She writes and speaks on Futures, appearing in a global list of 50 female futurists in Forbes.

She has spoken at UN HQ, the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office, and at events such as Think With Google. She has appeared on BBC Business Matters, is a go-to futurist for many national press titles, and is a contributor columnist in Forbes.

She was an Adage ‘Woman to Watch’ 2017, Women in Marketing Award Winner for Outstanding Contribution to Marketing 2016, and Inaugural Creative Strategy Jury President at Cannes Lions 2019. In 2018, she was listed by Business Cloud as a Trailblazing Woman in Tech. She is a member of the Association of Professional Futurists, World Futures Studies Federation, and a Fellow of the RSA.

Source: Google Books

Lee Rainie is a prominent researcher who has extensively studied the social impact of the internet and technology.

He is the Director of the Imagining the Digital Future Center at Elon University (since early 2024). In this role, he leads an initiative focused on exploring the future impacts of digital change.

For 24 years, he was the founding director of Internet and Technology Research at the Pew Research Center. During his tenure, his team produced over 850 reports on the social, political, and economic effects of the internet, mobile connectivity, social media, and artificial intelligence revolutions.

Amy Zalman is an internationally recognized futurist, author, and educator who advises government and business leaders on anticipating and navigating future change.

Current Roles:

• Advisory Specialist Leader, Defense, Security and Justice at Deloitte: She helps defense and civilian clients develop strategies to thrive in the evolving global information environment.
• Founder and CEO of Prescient LLC: A foresight consultancy that assists Fortune 500 companies, governments, and non-profit organizations in preparing for the future.
• Founder and Director of the Foresight Sandbox: An executive education program providing strategic foresight training.
• Part-time Professor of Strategic Foresight at Georgetown University.

Source: Gemini

Eleanor ‘Nell’ Watson, a trailblazer in emerging technologies such as machine vision and A.I. ethics, dedicates her work to protecting human rights and infusing ethics, safety, and values that elevate the human spirit into technologies like Artificial Intelligence.

As IEEE Ethics Maestro, Chair IEEE’s ECPAIS Transparency Experts Focus Group, and Vice Chair of P7001 Transparency of Autonomous Systems committee on A.I. Ethics & Safety, Nell is engineering mechanisms into A.I. to help safeguard algorithmic trust.

She also leads several prominent organizations such as EthicsNet.org, teaching machines prosocial behaviors, CulturalPeace.org, crafting Geneva Conventions-style rules for cultural conflict, Endohazard.org, a hazard symbol project for informing consumers of endocrine disruptors, and Pacha.org, connecting a network of service providers to help enable the automated accounting of externalities (shifted costs) such as pollution.

Source: Website

Dr. Evelyne Tauchnitz’s expertise focuses on how digital technologies can be employed to build, support, and maintain peace through non-violent methods of conflict transformation. She is employed as a Senior Researcher Fellow (Post-Doc) at the Lucerne Graduate School in Ethics (LGSE), University of Lucerne, where she is writing her ‘Habilitation’ on PeaceTech – exploring the impact of the digital transformation on peace & war from an ethical and human rights point of view.

Evelyne is also a Research Associate at the Centre for Technology and Global Affairs (CTGA), University of Oxford, where she is co-coordinating the Global PeaceTech project. She holds a PhD in International Relations with a specialization in Political Science from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID) in Geneva and was a Visiting Fellow (Post-Doc) at the Department of Political and Social Sciences (SPS), European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, Italy, where she conducted research on international norms and negotiation strategies.

Source: Lucerne Webpage

Paul is a forecaster with over three decades experience exploring the dynamics of large-scale, long-term change. He teaches forecasting at Stanford University and advises organizations worldwide. Paul is also a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council and a Fellow of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. Paul serves on a variety of not-for-profit boards including the Long Now Foundation, and the Millennium Project.

Paul’s essays have appeared in a wide range of publications including The Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Foreign Policy, Wired, The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, The New York Times, and the Washington Post. Paul holds degrees from Harvard College, Cambridge University and Stanford University.

Source: Website

Alexandra Samuel is an authority on the digital workplace. A speaker and data journalist, she is the co-author of Remote, Inc: How To Thrive at Work….Wherever You Are (Harper Business, 2021) and the author of Work Smarter with Social Media (Harvard Business Review Press, 2015).

Alex’s keynotes and trainings help organizations navigate the transition to the new hybrid workplace, which combines remote + office, and humans + AI.  Her writing on the workplace, business and technology appears frequently in The Wall Street Journal and The Harvard Business Review, and she is the AI columnist for JSTOR Daily.

The co-founder of groundbreaking digital agency Social Signal, Samuel creates data-driven flagship reports and workshops for companies like Google, Discovery and Sprinklr. She holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University, and works remotely from Vancouver, Canada.

Source: Website

The AT Protocol (Authenticated Transfer Protocol, or atproto) is a standard for public conversation and an open-source framework for building social apps.

It creates a standard format for user identity, follows, and data on social apps, allowing apps to interoperate and users to move across them freely. It is a federated network with account portability.

Source: Bluesky