Science & Society: AI and Us

Join us for a very special conversation with two of the world’s leading voices on AI: Professor Ruha Benjamin and Professor Kate Crawford. Benjamin is a sociologist and scholar of race, technology, and justice, while Crawford is an AI researcher and expert on the social and political impacts of artificial intelligence. Hosted by our Director of Publishing Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, they will discuss the growing prevalence of AI, and its impact, for the next session of Science & Society.

In an age of rampant techno-optimism (and growing techno-anxiety), AI is playing an ever-more central role in how we live, work, think and play: in the conduct of government, in the futures we imagine for ourselves and our species. How should we understand the biases baked into “large language models,” and other large data sets? How can we best demystify and account for the real and human costs of new technologies and the infrastructures they need? Who controls our data, and governs its use? What potentials exist for using AI, and other technologies, as tools not for bolstering extant iniquities but advancing justice?

After the conversation, join us in the garden for stargazing with the Amateur Astronomers Association. Eritrean-Ethiopian food will be available for purchase throughout the evening by . Please note that seating is limited and will be available on a first-come, first-serve basis.

About the speakers

Ruha Benjamin is a distinguished sociologist and transdisciplinary scholar at the intersections of science, technology, medicine, and society, with a particular focus on how innovation can perpetuate or mitigate social inequities. She holds the position of Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and is the founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, an initiative that seeks to harness data as a tool for justice. Her postdoctoral work includes fellowships at UCLA's Institute for Society and Genetics and Harvard University's Science, Technology, and Society Program. Throughout her career, Benjamin has authored several impactful books that explore the complex relationships between race, technology, and justice, including People's Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (2013), Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019), Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want (2022), and Imagination: A Manifesto (2024). Benjamin was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2024.

Kate Crawford is a research professor at USC Annenberg, a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research New York, and a leading scholar on the social and political impacts of artificial intelligence. She is the author of Atlas of AI: Power, Politics and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (winner of the Sally Hacker Prize), which explores how AI systems are shaped by history, power, and material resources. Crawford is also a co-founder of the Knowing Machines Project, investigating the epistemology of machine learning. Her latest work, Calculating Empires, spans exhibitions in Tokyo, Paris, Barcelona, Gijón, and Prague, examining the intersections of AI, governance, and global infrastructures.

Ruha Benjamin and Kate Crawford will be in conversation hosted by Joshua-Jelly Schapiro.

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is a geographer and writer, and he is Director of Publishing at Pioneer Works and the Executive Editor of Pioneer Works Broadcast. His books include Names of New York: Discovering the City’s Past, Present, and Future Through Its Place-Names and Island People: The Caribbean and the World.

The series grapples with our relationships with nature and each other. Each leads us deep into humanity’s timely and intersectional challenges, from biodiversity, to plastics, public knowledge, the high seas, farming, climate, and love. The series is supported by the Simons Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Program in Public Understanding of Science and Technology, bridging the two cultures of science and the arts.

Host or Publisher Pioneer Works