Baha'i Chair Annual Lecture 2026: AI Governance for the Common Good

Baha'i Chair for World Peace Annual Lecture 2026: AI Governance for the Common Good

The technologies of the Artificial Society—from large language models and chatbots to companion robots and agentic AI—are creating novel and disruptive questions for humanity. Who owns creativity and culture? Who is responsible when autonomous technologies cause harm or bias? What is cyber governance when hacks are no longer carried out by humans? How can we authenticate that someone is a live person or whether content is real or fake? What is the future of work, privacy, and speech rights in the age of artificial intelligence? How we answer these questions will shape humanity for decades, yet governance frameworks lag far behind technological change. Drawing from the venerable history of Internet governance and global cyber policy, this lecture explains the novel governance flashpoints of the Artificial Society and explores a future of AI governance for the common good.

Speaker Bio:  Dr. Laura DeNardis is Professor and Endowed Chair in Technology, Ethics and Society at Georgetown University, where she also directs the Center for Digital Ethics. A scholar of technology governance and cybersecurity, DeNardis was listed as one of thirty-two Innovators Building a Better Future by Wired UK. Among her eight books, The Internet in Everything: Freedom and Security in a World with No Off Switch (Yale University Press) was listed as a Financial Times Top Technology Book of 2020 and her book The Global War for Internet Governance (Yale University Press) is considered a definitive source for understanding conflicts in cyberspace. DeNardis is an affiliated fellow of the Yale Information Society Project, where she previously served as Executive Director and a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Professor DeNardis holds an AB in Engineering Science from Dartmouth College, an MEng from Cornell University, a PhD in Science and Technology Studies from Virginia Tech, and was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from Yale Law School.