Aspen Digital

As you read through the following, keep in mind that this does not represent the entirety of Aspen Digital’s work—nor even the entirety of Aspen Digital’s work on AI! We encourage you to browse around our site to see more of the work across our broader team.

As we begin a new year, Aspen Digital’s Emerging Tech Team put together the following retrospective on our work from 2024 and our plans for 2025.

In 2025, the Emerging Tech Team will be focusing on AI futures worth building. We help people “flex their hope muscles” by convening diverse networks and creating resources that make it easier to make technology work for ALL of us. We like to say that our work is fundamentally about cultivating AI-ready publics and public-ready AI:

1. Cultivating AI-ready publics
   • Rising Civic AI Leaders: Helping new-to-government technologists in states and cities across America navigate the policy world, work with civil society, and expand their network of peers and mentors.
   • Defining Technologies of Our Time: A new initiative compiling legal definitions for emerging tech with analysis from experts to help policymakers craft better, more future-proof legislation.
2. Cultivating public-ready AI
   • Community-Aligned AI Benchmarks: Building technical and policy mechanisms to incentivize the development of AI systems that focus on what the public actually wants from AI.
   • Amplify Public AI: Coordinating an international community of builders and advocates to produce AI infrastructures that are publicly accessible, accountable, and sustainable.

We produced a wide range of published work, including:

• AI in Manufacturing
  A guide with recommendations for manufacturers that are considering integrating automation into their operations
• 2023 Reporting on AI Hall of Fame
  Highlighting great reporting on AI, which got shoutouts from the FTC, Quill, and the ACLU’s CTO
• Resources for Teachers
  A media literacy lesson plan for teaching how to interpret AI in the news, which garnered excellent feedback from teachers and was even recommended as curriculum by SUNY Broome Community College
• AI Literacy
  An OpEd at Tech Policy Press about how we need media literacy education in the age of AI
• Public AI
  A whitepaper written in collaboration with the Public AI Network
• Civic AI Policy
  A short report on our learnings interviewing civil servants about hiring tech talent to develop AI processes, manage AI procurement, and advise on AI policy decisions for the public benefit
• From Our Fellows
  A series of blogs from a number of our fellows, covering topics like a policy brief on thoughtful AI adoption in manufacturing, better reporting on AI, and what public AI can learn from public health

The AI primers we released last year are also continuing to spread around the internet—from nonprofit blogs, to academic journalism articles, to Spanish language news outlets—as well as offline—from classrooms, to Congress, to diverse creative, religious, and activist communities like at the Black Joy AI Summit in 2024.

We also ran eight events:

• Talk Better About AI | Online
  A multi-part webinar covering smart practices for communication about AI and the launch of the Reporting on AI Hall of Fame, a competition to showcase clear and accurate journalistic coverage of AI.
• DWeb Camp AI Track | Navarro, CA
  A program of the decentralized tech conference hosted by the Internet Archive, where B co-chaired the AI track, sourcing speakers and facilitating sessions.
• Building a More Public AI Ecosystem | Washington, DC
  A collaboration with the Library of Congress, Metagov, and the Public AI Network, on building a public AI ecosystem that benefits the American public.
• _Tech Together Public AI Workshop | New York, NY
  An afternoon workshop we led on public AI at Siegel Family Endowment’s _Tech Together event.
• Grand Strategy in the Age of AI | Washington, DC & London, UK
  A collaboration with Chatham House to reimagine what it means for the US and UK to compete with China on AI, focusing on democratic values and domestic policy levers.
• AI & Philanthropy Meeting | New York, NY
  A Ford Foundation meeting of philanthropy presidents to discuss how their foundations should approach AI.
• AI x DEI CDO Roundtable | Online
  A closed-door discussion about DEI strategy and AI with Chief Diversity Officers of leading tech companies.
• Salon Dinner on the Future of AI Infrastructure | San Francisco, CA
  A collaboration with Benevolent AI Future to talk about how the private sector can support public AI.

Our team also spoke at Knight INFORMED, the NIST Manufacturing Extension Partnership, the NATO Youth Summit, the National Youth Employment Coalition Annual Forum, Adapting to the Age of AI: A JobsFirstNYC Convening, the Product Equity Summit, AI Palace, and on the Activists in Tech podcast, a Q&A with Siegel Family Endowment, and tbh from NPR.

We’re especially grateful to Siegel Family Endowment, the Center for Responsible Innovation, the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, the Knight Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Ford Foundation for their generous support of our work.

Do you want to talk about AI futures worth building? Have any feedback for us, we’d love to hear from you!