AI, Economy and Societal Impact

OBS! The presentation starts at 13:45. Registration and lunch from 13:00, for those who participate on site and have registered for lunch.

AI, Economy and Societal Impact

Recent dramatic advances in AI including ChatGPT and AlphaFold are having transformative effects across the whole economy and society at large. They offer great potential for advancing human prosperity, but at the same time, they pose serious risks.

In this open initiative seminar, we will have perspectives from world leading thinkers including Daron Acemoglu (remote participation), award winning economist  from MIT whose recent book "Power and Progress" examines how technology has interacted with the economy and society through the ages upto and including the current age of AI. Hannah Ruschemeier will provide a perspective from law, and Shalom Lappin will discuss the recent developments of large language models from a more technical perspective.

Programme of the day

Click below to see the agenda and to get more information about the talks.

Meet the speakers

Daron Acemoglu

Daron Acemoglu an Institute Professor at MIT and an elected fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, American Philosophical Society, the British Academy of Sciences, the Turkish Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, the European Economic Association, and the Society of Labor Economists. He is also a member of the Group of Thirty.

He is the author of six books, including New York Times bestseller Why Nations Fail: Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (joint with James A. Robinson), Introduction to Modern Economic Growth, The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty (with James A. Robinson), and Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity (with Simon Johnson).

His academic work covers a wide range of areas, including political economy, economic development, economic growth, technological change, inequality, labor economics and economics of networks.

Daron Acemoglu has received the inaugural T. W. Shultz Prize from the University of Chicago in 2004, and the inaugural Sherwin Rosen Award for outstanding contribution to labor economics in 2004, Distinguished Science Award from the Turkish Sciences Association in 2006, the John von Neumann Award, Rajk College, Budapest in 2007, the Carnegie Fellowship in 2017, the Jean-Jacques Laffont Prize in 2018, the Global Economy Prize in 2019, and the CME Mathematical and Statistical Research Institute prize in 2021.

He was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal in 2005, the Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in 2012, and the 2016 BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award.

He holds Honorary Doctorates from the University of Utrecht, the Bosporus University, University of Athens, Bilkent University, the University of Bath, Ecole Normale Superieure, Saclay Paris, and the London Business School.

Hannah Ruschemeier

Hannah Ruschemeier has been a junior professor for Public Law, Data Protection Law and Law of the Digital Transformation (tenure track W 3) at the Faculty of Law of the University of Hagen since 2022. She studied law at the University of Münster and the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. In 2018, she received her doctorate from the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf with a dissertation on the additive interference with fundamental rights. In her dissertation, she developed constitutional standards for the identification of cumulative burdens. After her legal clerkship and second state examination, she worked at the Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS) in Bochum, first as a research assistant in the project "Artificial Intelligence in State and Administration" and later as Principal Investigator Legal Studies in the team ELSI (Ethical, Legal and Social Issues of Digitalization).

Hannah Ruschemeier is a board member of RAILS e.V. (Robotics and AI Law Society), co-editor of the journal Legal Tech at Nomos Verlag, and a mentor at the German Women Lawyers Association. She continues to be associated with CAIS NRW as an Associate Researcher.

Her research interests include new forms of intervention in fundamental rights, digital aspects of administrative and constitutional law, legal foundations of digitalization, data protection law and legal aspects of privacy.

Read an interview with Hannah Ruschemeier on Linkedin >>

Shalom Lappin

Shalom Lappin is Professor of Natural Language Processing in the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London, Former Director of the Centre for Linguistic Theory and Studies in Probability at the University of Gothenburg, and Emeritus Professor of Computational Linguistics in the Department of Informatics at King’s College London.

His recent publications include 

"Assessing the Strengths and Weaknesses of Large Language Models", Journal of Logic, Language and Information, (2023), and

"Deep Learning and Linguistic Representation", Taylor and Francis, CRC, Oxford and Boca Raton (2021).

Read an interview with Shalom Lappin on Linkedin >>

This page is continuously updated with information on the programme. 

If you have questions about the event or want to be put on a waiting list for on-site participation, please contact: ict@chalmers.se