Seminar: Anticipating Impacts: AI Governance and the Question of Foresight

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Nicholas Diakopoulos, Northwestern University

Anticipating Impacts: AI Governance and the Question of Foresight

Anticipating the impacts of new AI technology in society is central to recent initiatives meant to help effectively govern it. But it’s also just fundamentally hard. The way in which a technology evolves and intersects with human intentions and social forces as it is deployed is subject to a range of uncertainties, including complex technical, social, and policy dynamics which may modulate the direction of sociotechnical development. Yet recent policy proposals, such as the EU AI Act, explicitly call for developers to identify “foreseeable risks” for high-risk uses of AI. How then should we go about developing the foresight needed? In this talk, I’ll describe several studies that examine and develop different foresight approaches, considering factors such as who does the foresight and at what phase of the project foresight is developed. I’ll then discuss the need to develop methodological standards and normative expectations in order to exercise a form of forward-looking accountability which holds actors responsible for their ability to effectively develop foresight.

Nicholas Diakopoulos is an Associate Professor in Communication Studies and Computer Science (by courtesy) at Northwestern University where he is Director of the Computational Journalism Lab (CJL) and Director of Graduate Studies for the Technology and Social Behavior (TSB) PhD program. He is also an Associate Professor II at the University of Bergen Department of Information Science and Media Studies and is on sabbatical as a visiting researcher at the University of Amsterdam IVIR during the 2022-23 academic year. Diakopoulos' research is broadly oriented around topics related to Computational Journalism with active research projects on AI, automation, and algorithms in news production and distribution. He also pursues research in the area of AI, Ethics, & Society with projects related to algorithmic accountability, transparency, and impact. He is the author of the award-winning book Automating the News: How Algorithms are Rewriting the Media from Harvard University Press.

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