About the Event
As AI reshapes nearly every aspect of modern life, how will it impact our democracy?
Join us for a conversation with Matthew Botvinick, senior fellow at Yale Law School and leading AI researcher at Anthropic, about his new book AI and Political Freedom: The Risk to Democracy and How to Respond. Drawing on his unique vantage point at the intersection of AI technology and democratic theory, Botvinick examines how artificial intelligence is poised to destabilize democratic institutions, exploit their most vulnerable pressure points, and hand authoritarian leaders a powerful new set of tools. However, the challenge is not without a path forward. Botvinick also discusses ways societies can safeguard political freedom in an AI-saturated world. This conversation, moderated by Nick Feamster, Neubauer Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Network Operations and Internet Security Lab at the University of Chicago, will take up questions from the integrity of elections to the future of public deliberation.
Who's Speaking
Matthew Botvinick
Matthew Botvinick, a widely cited AI researcher and neuroscientist, is senior fellow at Yale Law School and a member of the technical staff at Anthropic, leading research on AI and the rule of law. Previously, he served as senior director of research at Google DeepMind and led the Neural Computation...
Matthew Botvinick, a widely cited AI researcher and neuroscientist, is senior fellow at Yale Law School and a member of the technical staff at Anthropic, leading research on AI and the rule of law. Previously, he served as senior director of research at Google DeepMind and led the Neural Computation Lab at Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania.
Nick Feamster
Nick Feamster is Neubauer Professor of Computer Science and Faculty Director of Research at the Data Science Institute. Previously, he was a full professor in the Computer Science Department at Princeton University, where he directed the Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP); prior to Princeton, he was a full professor...
Nick Feamster is Neubauer Professor of Computer Science and Faculty Director of Research at the Data Science Institute. Previously, he was a full professor in the Computer Science Department at Princeton University, where he directed the Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP); prior to Princeton, he was a full professor in the School of Computer Science at Georgia Tech.
Before joining the faculty at Princeton, he was a professor in the School of Computer Science at Georgia Tech. He received his Ph.D. in Computer science from MIT in 2005, and his S.B. and M.Eng. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2000 and 2001, respectively. He was an early-stage employee at Looksmart (acquired by AltaVista), where he wrote the company’s first web crawler; and at Damballa, where he helped design the company’s first botnet-detection algorithm.
Nick is an ACM Fellow. He received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) for his contributions to cybersecurity, notably spam filtering. His other honors include the Technology Review 35 “Top Young Innovators Under 35” award, the ACM SIGCOMM Rising Star Award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, the NSF CAREER award, the IBM Faculty Fellowship, the IRTF Applied Networking Research Prize, and award papers at ACM SIGCOMM (network-level behavior of spammers), the SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference (measuring Web performance bottlenecks), and award papers at USENIX Security (circumventing web censorship using Infranet, web cookie analysis) and USENIX Networked Systems Design and Implementation (fault detection in router configuration, software-defined networking). His seminal work on the Routing Control Platform won the USENIX Test of Time Award for its influence on Software Defined Networking.