"It’s clear that the roadmap for AI governance won’t rely solely on business or academic research. It can—and should—be a collaboration between the two. But it takes innovators like Zittrain to bring them closer together.
"Big-picture questions around ethics and technology is the kind of thinking that university professors engage in all the time, but Zittrain’s launch of Assembly in 2017 is a reflection that academia’s ivory towers may not be the best place for such thought leadership to reside.
“'These issues have drifted from university to industry,' he says, 'and companies often have access to better data than we do. Our thought was to create a program to recruit people from the industry sector, including open source experts, corporate professionals, and star engineers, all of whom might have some sabbatical time saved up, to address problems that are bigger than any one company, bigger than a simple tech fix.'"
photo by Victoria Borneman