Hashtag: #citptalk

No RSVP required for current Princeton faculty, staff, and students. Open to members of the public by invitation only. Please contact Jean Butcher at  if you are interested in attending a particular lunch.

We live in a culture that depends on technologies to record our behavior and coordinate our actions with billions of other connected people. Some of these actions perpetuate deep-seated injustices by humans and machines. Our abilities to observe and intervene in other people’s lives also allow us to govern, forcing us to ask how to govern wisely and who should be responsible.

In this talk, hear about the history and future of democratic social experimentation, from Kurt Lewin and Karl Popper to Donald Campbell. You’ll also hear about CivilServant, software that supports communities to conduct their own experiments in governing human and machine behavior online. Communities with up to tens of millions of people have used CivilServant to test effective responses for responding to human/algorithmic misinformation, managing the risks of AI-based policy enforcement, preventing harassment, resolving politically-partisan conflict, and changing the behavior of people who engage in hate speech online.