Alondra Nelson

Alondra Nelson studies how people build, marshal, and live through new scientific and technological developments, and traces what that work makes possible or forecloses for life chances and democratic practice. She is the Harold F. Linder Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where she is founding director of the Science, Technology, and Social Values Lab. Her publications include the books Body and Soul, Genetics and the Unsettled Past, The Social Life of DNA, and Auditing AI, as well as articles in Science, Foreign Affairs, and the Proceedings of the International Conference on Machine Learning. She has been recognized with the Friedrich Schiedel Prize for Social Sciences and Technology from the Technical University of Munich, the Stanford University Sage-CASBS Award, and the MIT Morison Prize.

Nelson was Deputy Assistant to the President and Acting Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, architecting the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, a framework for the design and governance of automated systems. She served on the United Nations High-level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence and was Senior Adviser to the International AI Safety Report.

Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Medicine, and the Council on Foreign Relations, Nelson was named one of Nature’s global “Ten People Who Shaped Science” list and to the inaugural TIME100 list of Most Influential People in AI for her work on the social implications and governance of emerging technology.

AI2050 Project

We are living through the AI age yet have only begun to understand it. We encounter AI systems simultaneously in school, work, healthcare, finance, entertainment, and more. Yet researchers study these systems separately, one at a time. Few are documenting the experience of encountering many algorithmic systems at once in daily life: what it entails and what it changes. Nelson’s project combines survey methods with research following American families across regions and generations to produce the first sustained record of the cumulative impact of this AI transition, and to build the foundation for documenting and shaping what comes next.