Carolina hosts first AI for Public Good Conference
The full-day conference on April 13 kicked off with insights from leaders in tech, government and the University.
Government, tech industry and University leaders kicked off the morning sessions of Carolina’s inaugural AI for Public Good Conference on April 13. The full-day event delved into one central question: How can artificial intelligence be developed and applied in ways that truly serve the public good?
Here are some key takeaways from the morning’s speakers:
U.S. Rep. Valerie Foushee
On balancing promise and protection:
AI holds tremendous promise to improve systems in health care, education, agriculture, transportation, science and economic development. But these improvements cannot properly take shape without meaningful guardrails and safeguards that protect our communities and maintain public trust.
Gov. Josh Stein (via video message):
On state government’s role in AI use:
By working together across agencies, communities and levels of government, we can ensure that emerging technologies, like AI, strengthen our state while cybersecurity protections keep our communities safe. If we do this right, we can harness AI to unlock economic growth, attract innovation, improve government efficiency and prepare our workforce for the jobs of tomorrow.
Ronnie Chatterji, chief economist, OpenAI
On how he wants his children to use AI:
I’m trying to steer them into trying to embrace AI, but not too sort of blindly. It’s going to be able to teach them things that I can never teach them. They’re going to be able to go deeper and add the expertise that they don’t yet have to build bigger projects than they could before. At the same time, if they’re not doing the kind of critical thinking and the hard work and all the hours that we put in getting to our fields of expertise and where we are, they’re going to be missing out on something really fundamental. I don’t want that for my kids. I don’t want them to outsource critical thinking to an AI chatbot.
The conference provided a rare opportunity to hear from representatives from government and industry heavy hitters like OpenAI and Anthropic as well as Carolina’s own experts. (Jon Gardiner/UNC-Chapel Hill)
Thompson Paine, head of geopolitics, Anthropic
On the responsibilities of the creators of AI:
There’s this awesome responsibility, kind of this weight of responsibility, that each of these labs feels in different ways, to explain or help the world anticipate what is coming. And one of the ways that Jack Clark, one of our co-founders and first head of policy, often articulates this is it’s like there’s these playing cards that are all face down that represent the future, kind of an AI and HI future. And our job is to work with experts and hire experts internally to flip over as many of those cards as possible, so that the world can see what is coming. And then help the world — work with partners, experts and policy makers — prepare for that world.
Chancellor Lee H. Roberts
On Carolina’s history of dealing with technological advances:
We have always seen our role as understanding the latest technology and incorporating it into our service to the people of North Carolina. And we have not just the opportunity but I would argue the obligation to do that once again, with this transformative new technology.
Magnus Egerstedt, executive vice chancellor and provost
On AI and the public good
On the one hand, we have the most complex and, I would say, poorly understood piece of technology ever created. And on the other hand, 50 million users are using it in less than a week. There is a tension there, right? There is something interesting. This is why meetings like this are so important because AI can be a marvelous tool that, at its best, both should and could be used for the public good, but it’s not a given. So let’s solve that problem together today.
