OPEN DEBATE
• “From education to societal wellbeing for all: governing the disruptive and transformative power of AI”
June 23rd – h: 15:15 – 17:15 CET – on-line
The transformative power of LLM-based AI is unfolding before our eyes, and we experience it in most of our daily activities. In recent months, the penetration of AI use has reached remarkably high levels even among secondary school and university students and is advancing just as significantly in our daily interaction with the web – for instance, though not exclusively, through targeted answers at the top of search engine results pages, which increasingly encourage users to ask questions in natural language. During such interactions, users are no longer limited to searching for information for learning purposes (knowledge building) and/or requesting assistance with writing and/or translating texts, but there is also a significant increase in requests for medical, legal, design and financial investment advice, and even advice on social relationships (consider, for example, the growing number of young people seeking comfort in conversational exchanges with chatbots).
When confronted with a raging river, we cannot ask ourselves how to stem it, but rather how to harness its transformative and disruptive power.
It is therefore urgent to understand how river strength can be leveraged to generate well-being rather than harm in society, how to face today’s challenges and gaps, and anticipate future ones. In other words, how can individuals manage the phenomenon – at a time when DIY and “word of mouth” are the most common ways of approaching it — through warnings, recommended skills, or suggested precautions?
Above all, how can we help young people build a future career in which it will be essential for their individual competitiveness to know how to manage interaction with AI in an appropriate and professional manner without sacrificing the indispensable advantages of developing their own critical and ethical judgement (not only as a social convention, but even more importantly as an individual conviction) and human creativity?
This open discussion does not claim to provide definitive solutions, but rather to identify needs and potential strategies as clearly as possible, while acknowledging that that this fast‑moving landscape may change abruptly, requiring us to revisit and redefine our strategies and approaches.
Open Debate structure
SLERD Open Debates traditionally address a topical issue related to the conference theme and consist of a 2‑hour session. In the first part, 5–6 invited international experts briefly present their perspectives on the debate’s topic. In the second part, members of the audience take part in the discussion by asking questions to the speakers or contributing their own views.
The debate is “open” in the sense that interested participants may join the audience even if they are not registered for the conference..
Panelists
to be announced soon