The Hopes and Fears Lab, our flagship engagement project, went on tour in October and November 2023 to Parker’s Piece in Cambridge, and then on to central London as part of the nationwide series of public events called the AI Fringe
The conversation about Artificial Intelligence and what it means for all of us seems to grow more urgent each day but while high-level summits and conferences are frequent, actually talking and listening to the public on this is still quite rare.
The team at the KCESP, partnering with ai@cam and the Accelerate Programme, was approached by campaign group Connected by Data and social researchers Hopkins van Mil to support a week-long People’s Panel on AI during the Fringe. .
The twelve members of the People’s Panel were selected at random from across the UK (by the Sortition Foundation) and invited to London for a series of workshops and discussions to help them think through the implications of AI and draw up some recommendations for government, industry, civil society and academia on what we should do next. Read more about the project here.
As part of their week of discussion and learning in London, the Panel members spent time in a bespoke session of The Hopes and Fears Lab where they were able to talk to our scientists about all the possible futures AI could bring us and, crucially, work out what they felt about them. Topics under discussion included AI and Health; AI and Work; AI & Creativity; and even AI and Truth.
There’s something really great, as a scientist, about talking about what you do in understandable terms to people, and that step back that you have to do, to explain it to someone else, sometimes also fundamentally changes the way you think about your scientific questions, and can open much more interesting, new, and more impactful directions for you.
Neil Lawrence, The DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Cambridge.
Senior AI Fellow, The Alan Turing Institute,
Visiting Professor of Machine Learning, University of Sheffield
I was a bit skeptical about having a conversation, with a gentleman inside, about the AI truth, I do have a better understanding. The timer went, for 15 minutes, over twice — so the conversation was just so in depth.
The AI Hopes and Fears Lab: London Attendee.
The Panel loved their time at the Lab, and we received lots of glowing feedback – with several people saying these discussions were a highlight of the whole week for them. We’re delighted to have played a part in this important deliberative process and look forward to seeing how the Panel’s recommendations are developed.
For the rest of our day in London, The Hopes and Fears Lab welcomed everyone – from members of the local community around St Pancras and Somers Town to a crew from ITV News! As ever, some fantastic, thought-provoking conversations were had between our researchers and our publics (some of whom sneakily turned their timer over again just to keep talking!).
Watch our video of the event (as well as the sister event on buses in Cambridge) here.
(You can read about how we got on in Cambridge here.)
Additional thanks to the Mozilla Foundation and the Ada Lovelace Institute for supporting the People’s Panel on AI.
A bit of context…
The AI Safety Summit, hosted by the UK at Bletchley Park on 1-2 November 2023, was the first global gathering of leaders addressing the rapid development of AI technologies, and resulted in the publication of this declaration.
Whilst Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and representatives from over 20 countries discussed the implications of AI behind closed doors, the AI Fringe popped up nationwide to include publics and society in the conversation.
The next global in-person summit, The AI Action Safety Summit, takes place in France in February 2025.