DELPHI DIALOGUES 2023
“Technology and Democracy”
European Cultural Centre of Delphi, 21 June 2023
Under the patronage
of H.E. the President of the Hellenic Republic
Ms. Katerina Sakellaropoulou
Organiser
Grand Sponsor
The Initiative
Delphi is one of the most iconic landmarks of ancient Greek thought, its renown undimmed to this day. The European Cultural Centre οf Delphi (ECCD), whose statutory mission is the creation of a European and global intellectual centre at Delphi, is the primary cultural institution in Greece where the importance of humanitarian thought can and must be investigated on a permanent basis.
To this end, the ECCD is launching in 2023 the Delphi Dialogues. There, eminent thinkers and world-famous academics discuss topical issues and challenges that humanity is facing or is bound to face in the near future.
Delphi Dialogues 2023
The first Delphi Dialogues will take place on June 21, 2023, under the patronage of H.E. the President of the Hellenic Republic Ms. Katerina Sakelaropoulou, and thanks to the generosity of Eurolife. They will focus on the opportunities and challenges that technological developments, and especially digitization, may entail for democracy.
Internationally acclaimed thinkers and scientists will explore questions of fundamental importance such as the following:
- What are the potential opportunities and challenges that flourishing technological development entails for democracies, the citizens’ participation in political decision-making , and even the very essence of the “human”?
- How could the substitution of technological applications ( e.g., the recent invention of ChatGPT) for fundamental human functions precipitate the transition to the meta-human era?
- What does this mean for civilization, human thinking, education, the political, and the relationship between citizens and polities?
- How do all these unprecedented developments redefine the values of the so-called Humanism, in whose formation classical Greek antiquity has a prominent place?
PROGRAMME
17.30 – 17.45 | Opening Remarks
Panagiotis Roilos, Professor at Harvard University, President of the European Cultural Centre of Delphi.
Alexandros Sarrigeorgiou, President & CEO of Eurolife FFH.
17.45 – 19.00 | 1st Session
Étienne Balibar, University of Paris X-Nanterre and University of California.
THE DIGITAL CATASTROPHE AS ANTHROPOLOGICAL AND POLITICAL PROBLEM
Pierre Lévy, University of Ottawa.
THE DIGITAL PUBLIC SPHERE
Intervention: Alvin Wang Graylin, Global VP of Corporate Development, HTC.
19.00-19.15 Break
19.15-20.15 | 2nd Session
Philip N. Howard, University of Oxford
SCIENTIFIC COLLABORATION AND GOOD GOVERNANCE
Jeffrey Schnapp, Harvard University
DEMOCRACY GPT
20.30-21.30
Roundtable discussion
Speakers 2023
Étienne Balibar, Professor Emeritus of the University of Paris X-Nanterre and Professor Emeritus of the University of California.
The Digital Catastrophe as anthropological and political problem.
Born in 1942, has a PhD from the University of Nijmegen. He has held positions at Paris-Nanterre, Kingston University London, UC Irvine, and Columbia University. He is author of Reading Capital (1965, with Louis Althusser); Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (1991, with Immanuel Wallerstein); The Philosophy of Marx (1995), Spinoza and Politics (1998), Politics and the Other Scene (2002); We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (2004); Violence and Civility (2015); Citizen Subject: Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology (2017); Secularism and Cosmopolitanism (2018); On Universals: Constructing and Deconstructing Community (2020).
Alvin Wang Graylin, Global VP of Corporate Development, HTC.
The Coming Metaverse Revolution
He has been the China President at HTC, leading all aspects of Vive/VR and Smartphone businesses since 2016 and this year just added the role of Global VP of Corporate Development, driving key partnership engagement for the company. He is also currently Vice-Chairman of the Industry of Virtual Reality Alliance (IVRA) with 300+ company members, President of the $18B Virtual Reality Venture Capital Alliance (VRVCA) and oversees the ViveX VR Accelerators in Beijing, Shenzhen and Tel Aviv. ViveX is the most active investor in the XR space with over 110 investments in the space in the last 6 years.
Graylin was born in China during the Cultural Revolution, educated in the US during PC revolution, played a significant role to fuel the internet and mobile revolution, and now recognized as a top global thought leader for the coming Metaverse revolution. He received his MS in computer science specializing in AI from MIT and MS in Business from MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He graduated top of his department with a BS in electrical engineering from University of Washington, where he had specialized in VR, AI and CPU architecture.
Philip N. Howard, Professor at the University of Oxford and Chair of the International Panel on the Information Environment.
Scientific Collaboration and Good Governance
Phil Howard is the Director of Oxford University’s Programme on Democracy and Technology and a Professor and Fellow of Balliol College. Howard’s research is multidisciplinary, focusing on the relationship between technology and politics, on theories of deliberative democracy, and comparative regime types. His research currently involves policy analysis and big data research into the information operations targeted at voters in democracies—what he calls “computational propaganda”.
He was recently named a “Global Thinker” by Foreign Policy, and the National Democratic Institute gave him their “Democracy Prize” for pioneering the social science of fake news.
He currently Chairs the Oxford Commission on AI and Good Governance, which investigates how government agencies should design and use artificial intelligence to improve public life.
He has published ten books and edited volumes and authored over 130 scholarly articles, book chapters, and working papers. He has won best book prizes from multiple professional organizations across the social sciences.
His most recent book is Lie Machines: How to Save Democracy from Troll Armies, Deceitful Robots, Junk News Operations, and Political Operatives, which exposes the upsurge of highly organized campaigns to manipulate voters.
Pierre Lévy, philosopher, cultural theorist, and media scholar. Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
The Digital Public Sphere.
Pierre Lévy is a philosopher who devoted his professional life to the understanding of the cultural and cognitive implications of the digital technologies, to promote their best social uses and to study the phenomenon of human collective intelligence.
He has written a dozen of books on this subject that have been translated in more than 12 languages and are studied in many universities all over the world.
He invented the Information Economy MetaLanguage (IEML), a data modelling tool with the same expressive power as a natural language and the regularity of an algebra. Pierre Lévy is fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and received several awards and academic distinctions.
Jeffrey Schnapp, Carl A. Pescosolido Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of Comparative Literature, Faculty co-director of Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University.
Democracy GPT
He is the director of metaLAB (at) Harvard and co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. He holds the Pescosolido Chair in Romance Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences but is also serves on the teaching faculty at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.
The author of thirty books and hundreds of essays, his recent publications concern the modern and contemporary eras with a focus on art, media, architecture, design, politics, technology and the history of communications.
His curatorial collaborations include work with the Triennale di Milano, Wolfsonian-FIU (Miami), Museo Madre (Naples), Canadian Center for Architecture (Montreal), and the Musei Civici (Bologna). His collaborative Trento Tunnels project—a 6000 sq. meter pair of highway tunnels repurposed as an experimental history museum—was present in the Italian pavilion of the 2010 Venice Biennale of Architecture. He is also the co-founder of Piaggio Fast Forward, a subsidiary of the Milan-based Piaggio Group, known throughout the world for iconic vehicles like the Vespa and iconic brands like Aprilia and Moto Guzzi, where, after three years of service as CEO, he now occupies the position of Chief Visionary Officer.