Innovating Democracy - San Fransisco
Language: English・By Invitation Only
Info
Here in the Bay Area, engineers build the systems that shape what billions of people read, believe, and share. Part of democracy’s future is being decided here. It is time the public had a say.
The region has always been two things at once: a laboratory of technology and a stage for dissent. From the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley to the garages of Silicon Valley, this is where people fought over who gets to speak and who writes the rules. Today that question is back.
At the Goethe-Institut, we bring together citizens, technologists, scholars, and activists. We debate propositions that are allowed to sting. Should AI be regulated like a medicine or like a tool? Is content moderation protection or censorship? How much trust does a technology deserve when we barely understand it?
AI itself has a seat at the table. A platform moderates, transcribes, and analyzes the conversation in real time. It finds bridging statements between seemingly irreconcilable positions and shows which versions of a consensus might be possible. In other words, we test the machine on the very question of how we want to govern it.
An experiment with an open outcome. That is the point.
Participants
Miriam Meckel is a full professor at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, specializing in communication management and technologies and co-founder of ada Learning GmbH. She has extensive experience in science, journalism, and politics, including as Harvard Fellow, editor-in-chief of WirtschaftsWoche, and State Secretary for Media and International Affairs in North Rhine-Westphalia. Her research focuses on technological transformation and innovation. She publishes widely both academically and journalistically.
