I want to welcome you all to HAI's conference on AI ethics policy and
governance since HAI's launched here in
this auditorium in March we've had an overwhelmingly enthusiastic response and
support for our Institute and it's human centered approach and we're so pleased
to be here today to welcome you to our first actual major conference hi um this
is my co-director John Etchemendy for HAI and I'm Fei-Fei Li I'm also
co-director of HAI so HAI like John said was founded half a year ago on
three simple but powerful ideas first for AI to better serve human needs it
must incorporate more of the versatility nuance and depth of the
human intellect. Second the development of AI should be paired with
an ongoing study to understand anticipate and guide its impact on
humanity and our social institutions a third the ultimate purpose of AI should
be to enhance and augment our humanity not to diminish or replace it
so over the course of the next two days we invite you to reflect on how we can
all work together to ensure that the concern for the human dimensions of
machine intelligence remain front and center as the technology is developed
and deployed we have an amazing speaker line-up that was generated to reflect
two important goals of HAI. First to cultivate interdisciplinary scholarship
so you will hear from people across engineering social sciences the
humanities and much more second to convene multilateral stakeholders for
academia government civil society and Industry the audience for the conference
is drawn from each of these arenas and we hope you will model our
cross-disciplinary and cross sector conversations by meeting people outside
of your usual circle during the breaks and the sessions so finally before we
actually begin the program we would like to thank some of our closest friends and
supporters our early early supporters including Bob and Dottie King, Steve and
Roberta Denning, Reed Hoffman, and Michelle Yee,
Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki, Rama and Vijay Sharam, John and Andrea Hennessy,
and Eric Horvitz. and we'd also like to thank Dario Gill, Arvind Gupta, Jeff
Welser and and Wendy Belluomini at IBM Research and Andy Jassy, Swami Sivasubramanian
Teresa Carlson and Ann Mary Hugh at Amazon Web Services thank you
all for making all of this possible and now we would like to turn things
over to the real hosts of this conference Rob Reich and Suzanne Athey who are two
of HAI's hard-working associate directors who have spearheaded this
event and put in a lot of effort to make it to pull it off
morning everybody my name is Rob Reich I'm a professor here in the political
science department and just to forestall any possible confusion I am NOT the
former Secretary of Labor he teaches across the bay lesser in
stature up here but greater in height I want to add my own welcome to the more
than 900 people participating in the HAI conference over the next two days
representing academia civil society government and industry and in addition
to all the people on the livestream Susan Athey and I hope to use this
conference to broaden the HAI community across campus to address the important
issues related to the interplay between technology and society and I'm really
pleased to say that we were not disappointed at all with the results we
program this conference by calling up numerous colleagues in different
departments across campus asking them to take the lead in organizing the nearly
dozen breakout sessions that will be scheduled today and tomorrow in addition
to several rated workshops and we were overwhelmed with an enthusiastic
response but of course we're just beginning to process HAI is still in its
infancy and we're trying to build across time a broad network across campus that
will touch almost every department and corner of the university building
intellectual life making connections and empowering students fellows and faculty
to pursue interdisciplinary research that will be necessary we believe to
harness artificial intelligence perhaps the most important technology of the
21st century to serve rather than to undermine human interests Stanford as
you know has a long history of collaborations like this and we think
it's the ideal place for an initiative like HAI.