On May 7, 2024 more than 150 attendees, including many from CCC’s closely affiliated non-profit, Cortico, spent a full day at MIT engaging in conversation and exploration related to the rapidly changing world of social networks and the growing challenges of integrating generative AI into this changing landscape in a positive way. 

We covered a lot of ground in one day, so the CCC team put together a multimedia medley that we hope provides an overview of some of the event’s key themes, including highlights from the three fireside chats (detailed below), CCC Director Deb Roy’s “state of the network” talk, and the six workshops. 

As is only fitting, these highlights were gathered and produced by CCCers who listened to the recordings, created the highlights, and tagged those highlights with prominent themes from an AI-generated codebook. 

In addition to the interactive workshops (some of which have highlights in the medley), attendees were invited to view more than 20 research projects that showcased new tools, methods, and systems focused on combining the ancient wisdoms of human conversation with emerging digital technologies.

Carrying through with the importance of facilitated conversations to CCC’s work, the day also included a lunch-time game activity, where all attendees got to play Analogia with those at their lunch tables. The game, developed by CCC master’s candidate Cassie Lee, involves sharing your honest–and sometimes challenging–stories as players use prompts and fantastical images to forge new human connections.

Want to learn more? You can find video highlights of key sessions here:

– CCC Director Deb Roy’s opening remarks

– CCC Director Deb Roy’s State of the Network talk, which outlined some of the challenges and potential solutions for a world where trust continues to erode at an alarming rate–a world where the content of social media posts are too often divisive opinions and falsehoods that spread virally. He likened the current online experience to “stumbling from private spaces directly into Times Square.” Emphasizing that communications should only move “at the speed of trust,” Roy stressed the importance of trusted human connection and the role that a new social dialogue network could play in fostering these connections.

– On Democracy: Legal scholar and CCC senior advisor Martha Minow, 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard Law School, in conversation with Melody Barnes, US public policy expert and director of the Karsh Institute of Democracy and J. Wilson Newman Professor of Governance at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia,  moderated by Andrew Heyward, CCC senior advisor and former head of CBS News.

– On Trust: AI leader Oren Etzioni, former chief executive officer at AI2, professor emeritus at the University of Washington, advisor and board member for AI2, and technical director of the AI2 Incubator, in conversation with disinformation expert Claire Wardle, co-founder and co-director of the Information Futures Lab, and professor of the practice at the Brown School of Public Health, moderated by Dimitra Dimitrakopoulou, head of CCC’s translational research team,

– On Listening: Professor Kathy Cramer, Natalie C. Holton Chair of Letters & Science and Virginia Sapiro Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, whose research focuses on the way people in the United States make sense of politics, their connections to each other, and to their governments, in conversation with youth development practitioner Robert Clark, founder and CEO of the Newark Opportunity Youth Network, moderated by Deb Roy.