Democratizing AI: Decentralized Power vs Oligarchic Capture

Political philosopher Annette Zimmermann (UW-Madison) asks how societies can bring AI under meaningful democratic control

Political philosopher Annette Zimmermann (UW-Madison) presents themes from her new book Democratizing AI. Power over AI is currently concentrated among a small group of corporate deployers, while the risks of AI are dispersed across society at large. Democratizing AI offers a playbook for how societies can bring AI under meaningful democratic control. Its strategies combine regulation with the power of tech workers, independent expert voices, citizen mobilization, and new models of ownership in the technology sector.

About the speakerAnnette Zimmermann is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Affiliate Professor of Statistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She works on the ethics and politics of artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data, with a focus on algorithmic injustice, trust in AI, and democratic control over technology. Previously, she was a Technology & Human Rights Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. She was also a Lecturer at the University of York, where she founded an MA programme in Philosophy of AI, and a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University. She holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford. Her work has appeared in Philosophy & Public Affairs, Nature Machine Intelligence and at NeurIPS, and she received the American Philosophical Association’s Public Philosophy Op-Ed Award.