Four Montgomery Fellows coming to campus this winter and spring will delve into questions of language, freedom of expression, and agency in relation to artificial intelligence in a series of public talks and meetings with students, faculty, and staff members.
The Agency, Speech, and Ethics in the AI Era series will open with Luciano Floridi, founding director of the Digital Ethics Center at Yale University, who will speak at 5 p.m. on Feb. 26, in room 13 of Carpenter Hall. Floridi will be followed in the spring by Martha Pollack '79, president emerita of Cornell University; Sylvie Delacroix, a philosopher and legal theorist; and Orit Halpern '94, a media scholar and historian of science.
To create the series, Steve Swayne, director of the Montgomery Fellows Program, sought out the help of James "Jed" Dobson, an associate professor of English and creative writing, director of the Writing Program, and special advisor to the provost for artificial intelligence.
"Montgomery has a specific place within the larger institution to bring exceptional people to an exceptional place," says Swayne, who is also the Jacob H. Strauss 1922 Professor of Music. "Given the moment in which we find ourselves, with AI being a, if not the hot topic, it seemed natural to work with Jed to bring to campus these prominent thinkers, writers, and researchers."
The speakers come to Hanover as Dartmouth continues its tradition of incorporating innovation and new technology into classrooms and research labs, with recent initiatives to help interested faculty members integrate generative AI into their courses. And as the phrase artificial intelligence approaches 70.
"The term AI began here at Dartmouth in 1956, and this is an early celebration of that anniversary," Swayne says.
Floridi will be on campus from Feb. 24 to 28. In his talk, AI and the Future of Content, he will explore the technology's role in content creation, dissemination, and consumption; examine its potential, analytical models, and personalized content; and advocate for responsible AI management to foster diversity and democratization.
Floridi studies digital ethics, the ethics of AI, the philosophy of information, and the philosophy of technology, and has worked closely on digital ethics with government agencies and corporations around the world. In addition to leading the Digital Ethics Center, he is a professor in the cognitive science program at Yale University, a professor of sociology of culture and communication at the University of Bologna, and editor-in-chief of the journal Philosophy & Technology. His most recent books are The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence: Principles, Challenges, and Opportunities, and The Green and The Blue: Naive Ideas to Improve Politics in the Digital Age, both published in 2023.
Pollack, who majored in linguistics at Dartmouth, will be on campus from April 14 to 23. Her public talk, AI and the Mission of Higher Education, will situate AI's impact within the context of the mission and core values of higher education, assessing the concerns AI raises and potential opportunities it affords to educators and scholars.
Throughout her career in research and academia, Pollack has been deeply interested in language, conversation, and communication. During her tenure as president of Cornell, she prioritized freedom of expression, one of the institution's core values, and made the topic a university-wide theme for the 2023–2024 academic year. Pollack is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
Delacroix's residency, April 28 to May 9, will include her presentation of Lost in Conversation: Uncertainty, Value-Alignment, and Large-Language Models. The public talk will examine the ways in which LLMs could shape future conversations about AI, and highlight the importance of not merely sitting on the sidelines as AI reshapes the world.
Delacroix is the Inaugural Jeff Price Chair in Digital Law and the director of the Centre for Data Futures at King's College London, and a visiting professor at the University of Tohoku in Japan. Her work addresses the ethical, legal, and political dimensions of technology, and she has contributed to policy work on trust and transparency in relation to governmental use of data and the use of algorithms in criminal justice. Her research led to the first data trust pilots worldwide being launched in 2022 in the context of the Data Trusts initiative, which she co-chairs. Her latest book, Habitual Ethics?, was published in 2022.
Halpern will be on campus from May 12 to 23. Her talk, Financializing Intelligence: AI, Neo-Liberal Economics, and Reactionary Politics, will outline the historical convergence between neo-liberal economic thought, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence, and what that history means for contemporary politics and society.
Halpern is Lighthouse Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures at Technische Universität Dresden. Her work focuses on the intertwined histories of science, computing, and cybernetics with design. Her books include Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason Since 1945, and The Smartness Mandate, co-authored with Duke University professor Robert Mitchell, is a history of human beings' obsession with smart technologies.
Dobson says the upcoming residencies offer a valuable opportunity to analyze the issues surrounding AI, both globally and within the field of higher education.
"With this series of Montgomery Fellows, we have gathered experts poised to help us at Dartmouth think through the most pressing concerns—legal, ethical, linguistic, philosophical, and political—raised by recent developments in artificial intelligence and in their application to research, teaching, and everyday life," Dobson says. "If generative AI is going to alter teaching and learning in some way, how can we ensure that we're providing direction at the forefront of it, not merely reacting to it?"