Seminar: Democratizing AI: Why and How

Calls to ‘democratize AI’ are ubiquitous, yet disagreement persists about what this means in concrete terms, and why this is a desirable political and ethical goal in the first place. In my forthcoming book, “Democratizing AI”, I answer both questions. I argue that popular arguments that conflate democratizing AI with the mere ability of a larger group of people to access AI miss the mark, as do arguments that adopt an unduly optimistic, technosolutionist perspective on AI’s place within democratic processes. I offer an alternative view that centers the concept of democratic legitimacy and that mobilizes some useful conceptual resources in analytic political philosophy. In this talk, I’ll sketch a few interesting policy implications of this perspective.

Annette Zimmermann’s research interests cover a range of topics within the philosophy of AI and machine learning, political philosophy, moral philosophy, social and moral epistemology, philosophy of law and philosophy of science. As an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at UW-Madison, Zimmermann serves as a RISE-AI Thought Leader, is a member of the University’s interdisciplinary cluster in the ethics of computing, data, and information, and an Affiliate Professor at the Department of Statistics. Zimmermann also co-leads the Uncertainty & AI group at the Institute for Research in the Humanities. In the academic year 2025/26, Annette Zimmermann is a Visiting Full Professor at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bayreuth, and a Visiting Fellow at the Weizenbaum Institute.

Before joining UW-Madison’s Department of Philosophy, Zimmermann was a 2020-2023 Technology and Human Rights Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University. In addition, Zimmermann was a permanent Lecturer (US equivalent: Assistant Professor) at the Department of Philosophy at the University of York in the United Kingdom (2020-22), and a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University (2018-20), with a joint appointment at the Center for Human Values and the Center for Information Technology Policy. Zimmermann holds a DPhil (PhD) from the University of Oxford (2018).

Zimmermann's first book is titled Democratizing AI (forthcoming 2025). Zimmermann’s research has been published in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy and in Philosophy and Public Affairs, and their recent public writing has appeared in the New Statesman and in the Boston Review. Zimmermann frequently advises policy-makers and technologists working on contemporary ethical and political issues surrounding AI and other forms of technology, including UNESCO, the OECD, the Australian Human Rights Commissioner, the German Aerospace Center, the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, the UK Parliament, and the UK government’s Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation. Zimmermann has previously held visiting fellowships at the ANU, Yale University, and the Weizenbaum Institute in Berlin, and has received the American Philosophical Association's Public Philosophy Award as well as winning the Hastings Center's Science, Ethics, and Society Essay Prize.

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