About the Event: Catastrophic, civilization-threatening climate change is a genuine possibility within the coming century. This talk will consider evidence that a variety of climate tipping points and other planetary boundaries have already been crossed, and that climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases may be considerably higher than recent IPCC estimates. Further, modeling of cascading risks – such as how multiple tipping points might interact if thresholds are crossed – suggests that the full impact of anthropogenic environmental change remains unknown and likely underestimated.  Meanwhile, a widespread focus on high-level international and national governance obscures how denial, disinformation, and multi-layered, subnational governance processes are delaying and derailing changes needed to reach Paris Agreement goals. The talk will end with reflections on ways forward. 
 
About the Speakers: Paul N. Edwards is Senior Research Scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Director of the Program on Science, Technology & Society, and Co-Director of the Stanford Existential Risks Initiative, as well as Professor of Information and History (Emeritus) at the University of Michigan. Edwards is the author of A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2010) and The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (MIT Press, 1996), and co-editor of Changing the Atmosphere: Expert Knowledge and Environmental Governance (MIT Press, 2001), as well as other books and numerous articles. With Janet Vertesi, he co-edits the Infrastructures book series for MIT Press. Edwards recently served as a Lead Author for the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2021).

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: The emergence of generative language models, such as the one powering ChatGPT, has sparked widespread interest due to its potential implications for the future of work and society at large. The drive to automate decision-making is reaching high-stakes applications like military applications and mental health care, where non-zero error rates lead to individual failures with dire consequences and the potential to cause wide-scale harm. Thus, it is time to scrutinize and ask whether we should use language models in high-stakes decision-making scenarios. In this talk, I will dissect the question by studying how human decision-making differs from language models, if language models add their own dynamics to conflict situations, and whether they can recognize emergency/high-stakes user queries. 
 
About the Speaker: Max Lamparth is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, the Stanford Center for AI Safety, and the Stanford Existential Risks Initiative at Stanford University. He is advised by Prof. Steve Luby, Prof. Paul Edwards, and Prof. Clark Barrett.

With his research, he wants to make AI systems more secure and safe to use to avoid individual and wide-scale harm. Specifically, he is focusing on how to improve the robustness and alignment of language models, how to make their inner workings more interpretable, and how to reduce the potential for misuses.

Max received his Ph.D. in August 2023 from the Technical University of Munich and previously a B.Sc. and M.Sc. from the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

Alexandra O. Hudson is a writer, popular speaker, and the founder of Civic Renaissance, a publication and intellectual community dedicated to beauty, goodness, and truth. She was named the 2020 Novak Journalism Fellow, and contributes to Fox News, CBS News, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, TIME Magazine, POLITICO Magazine, and Newsweek. She earned a master’s degree in public policy at the London School of Economics as a Rotary Scholar, and is an adjunct professor at the Indiana University Lilly School of Philanthropy. She is also the creator of a series for The Teaching Company called Storytelling and The Human Condition. Her first book, The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves, was released by St. Martin’s Press in October 2023. She lives in Indianapolis, IN, with her husband and children.

Francis Fukuyama is Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a faculty member of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). He is also Director of Stanford's Masters in International Policy Program, and a professor (by courtesy) of Political Science.  Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues in development and international politics. His 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His most recent book, Liberalism and Its Discontents, was published in the spring of 2022.

The alliance between the United States and South Korea has endured through seven decades of shifting regional and geopolitical security contexts. Yet it now faces challenges from within. Domestic political turmoil, including deepening political polarization and rising nationalism in both countries, has cast doubt on the alliance's viability—with critical implications for the balance of power in East Asia.

In this talk, Scott Snyder will discuss the internal and external pressures on the U.S.-South Korea alliance and explore its future prospects. He argues that nationalist leaders' accession to power could put past successes at risk and endanger the national security objectives of both countries. In the United States, "America First" nationalism favors self-interest over cooperation and portrays allies as burdens or even free riders. "Korea first" sentiments, in both progressive and conservative forms, present the U.S. military presence in South Korea as an obstacle to Korean reconciliation or a shackle on South Korea's freedom of action.

Snyder will also examine North Korea's attempts to influence South Korean domestic politics and how China's growing strength has affected the dynamics of the alliance. He considers scenarios in which the U.S.-South Korea relationship weakens or crumbles, emphasizing the consequences for the region and the world. Drawing on this analysis, Snyder offers timely recommendations for stakeholders in both countries on how to preserve and strengthen the alliance.

Scott A. Snyder is president and chief executive officer at the Korea Economic Institute of America. Previously, he was senior fellow for Korea studies and director of the program on U.S.-Korea policy at the Council on Foreign Relations from 2011 to March 2024. Mr. Snyder is the author of The United States-South Korea Alliance: Why It May Fail and Why It Must Not (December 2023) and South Korea at the Crossroads: Autonomy and Alliance in an Era of Rival Powers (January 2018). Mr. Snyder received a BA from Rice University and an MA from the regional studies East Asia program at Harvard University.

With the rapid advances in the last couple of years, generative AI has attracted a great deal of attention in advanced economies. The U.S. seems to be betting on its positive potentials while Europe is generally more apprehensive about its harmful aspects. Japan has arguably been one of the most forward-leaning countries when it comes to harnessing the potential of AI, in the hopes of reclaiming its leadership in high-tech industries lost during the last few decades as it fell behind on digital transformation. How is Japan catching up on information technologies in general, and what are Japan’s plans for leveraging generative AI for economic resurgence while ensuring its peaceful and equitable development? This panel session addresses these questions with leading experts of AI and digital transformation in Japan and the U.S.

Speakers:

Kenji Hiramoto is the Director General of the Digital Infrastructure Center (DISC), IT Promotion Agency (IPA), Japan and Executive Officer for the International Data Strategy, Digital Agency, Japan. He began his career at NTT Data in 1990 as a systems engineer. In 1998, he served at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), where he provided educational technology. In 2001, he served as project manager of Stanford Japan Center, Stanford University. In 2002, he served at consulting firm. Hiramoto served as Executive Advisor to the Government CIO in 2008, and in 2012, became Chief Strategist(IT) in the cabinet secretariat, where he was responsible for digital strategy for 13 years. In more recent years, Hiramoto served as Head of Data Strategy and Executive Officer of the Digital Agency in 2021, where he was responsible for the National Data Strategy and the Government Interoperability Framework. In 2023, he become the Director General of DISC, IPA. Presently, he now serves as the Secretary General of the Japan AI Safety Institute.

Akiko Murakami is the Executive Officer and Chief Data Officer of Sompo Japan Insurance Inc.. She delivers DX of P&C insurance utilizing digital technologies and AI for the purpose of innovation challenges with digital media. Prior to joining Sompo Japan in 2021, she was a researcher of natural language processing, social analysis and text mining at IBM Research for 16 years. After this, she represented Watson development as an architect at IBM for 5 years.Murakami is involved in "resilient engineering" that utilizes IT for disaster recovery, mitigation, and risk management and founded “IT Disaster Assistance and Response Team” (IT DART) in 2015 and became a board member. She is also a board member of The Association for Natural Language Processing from Apr 2022. She was a part-time lecturer at the Disaster Prevention Research Institute, Kyoto University by Mar. 2024. In 2024, her background led her to become the Executive director of the Japan AI Safety Institute.

Moderator:

Tricia Wang, a social scientist, consultant, and thought leader, is on a relentless quest to ensure technology serves humanity, fostering social impact at the intersection of data and humanity. Renowned for helping companies unearth pivotal customer behavior insights to unlock growth, Tricia co-founded Sudden Compass and has advised industry giants like Google, Spotify, and P&G. Her insights have been featured in publications like Quartz, New Yorker, Buzzfeed, Techcrunch, The Atlantic, Al Jazeera, Slate, Wired, The Guardian, and Fast Company. In a world where data is the cornerstone of innovation, Tricia has long recognized its potential, well before the recent rush of consumer-facing AI products. Tricia's unique fusion of ethnography and data science offers an invaluable perspective on technology, design, and human experience. She has been instrumental in launching tech labs with clients, including a recent collaboration with The World Economic Forum in founding the Crypto Research and Design Lab (CRADL). As an acclaimed speaker, Tricia's enlightening keynotes and her TED Talk delve into AI, data, and their societal, economic, and personal impacts. Her concept of "thick data" advocates for deep human understanding in AI and emerging technologies, transcending conventional data analysis. Her ethnographic fieldwork spans from China to South America and North America, offering unique insights into the adoption of social media under authoritarian regimes and advocating for consumer-centric approaches in the private sector.

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) celebrated its tenth anniversary last year, marking a significant milestone for a project that has attracted international attention and scrutiny. While much discussion about the BRI revolves around China's infrastructure loans in the Global South and its nascent development bank, the AIIB, it is still unclear how the BRI is engaged with China's broader trade strategy. This session will take a deeper look into the trade implications of the BRI and make a broader examination of its impact on global commerce dynamics since its founding ten years ago. Join our panelists Jessica Liao and Laura Stone as they ask: What is the essence of China’s 21st-century trade strategy, and how does the BRI factor into this vision?

Jessica C. Liao is an associate professor of political science and 2020-2021 Wilson China Fellow. She spent the past two and a half years in Beijing and throughout 2022, served as an economic development specialist at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing where she covered China’s relations with Belt and Road Initiative countries. Prior to NC State, she taught at George Washington University and was a visit fellow at Monash University, Kuala Lumpur campus. She received her PhD in international relations from the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on Chinese foreign policy and East Asian politics.

Laura Stone, a member of the U.S. Department of State, is the Inaugural China Policy Fellow (2022-24) at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC). She was formerly Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Bhutan, and Maldives, the Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for China and Mongolia, the Director of the Office of Chinese and Mongolian Affairs, and the Director of the Economic Policy Office in the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs. She served in Hanoi, Beijing, Bangkok, Tokyo, the Public Affairs Bureau, the Pentagon Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. While at APARC, she is conducting research with the China Program on contemporary China affairs and U.S.-China policy.