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AI, Power, and Accountability: Who Shapes the Future?
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Tue, Mar 24, 2026
6 PM – 8 PM EDT (GMT-4)
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AI is no longer just a technology. It is a force reshaping markets, institutions, and society. As these systems grow more powerful, a critical question emerges: who should be responsible for the decisions they make and the harm they may cause?
Join us for a special evening at NYU Stern:
AI, Power, and Accountability: Who Shapes the Future?
Featuring:
Jim Fruchterman - social entrepreneur and author of Technology for Good, who has spent decades building mission-driven technology organizations serving the public interest.
Meredith Broussard - professor and author of Artificial Unintelligence, whose work examines the limits and risks of AI systems in society.
Together, they will explore:
Together, they will explore:
- Who should control the development of transformative technologies
- Whether markets can regulate themselves
- The role of nonprofits and public-interest institutions
- What future leaders must understand about governing AI
This conversation is designed for students, professionals, and policymakers seeking a deeper understanding of how technology is shaping power and what responsible leadership looks like in practice.
Hors d’oeuvres and refreshments will be served.
Networking happy hour to follow at a nearby venue.
Limited seating. Advance registration required.
Speakers
Jim Fruchterman
Technologist for Good and Serial Entrepreneur
Jim Fruchterman is a leading social entrepreneur, a MacArthur Fellow, a recipient of the Skoll Award, and a Distinguished Alumnus of Caltech. His life’s work is applying technology to benefit the 90% of humanity typically neglected by for-profit tech companies, by building the tech and data for good movements and launching nonprofit open source software enterprises.
Jim’s career started with a private enterprise rocket company. Although the rocket blew up on the launch pad, this experience launched his entrepreneurial career in Silicon Valley, where he co-founded two successful machine learning/artificial intelligence companies.
Jim’s first social good product was a machine that recognized letters and words and read those words aloud to people who are blind. He founded Benetech, a pioneering nonprofit technology company, to empower people with disabilities to read independently. He continued by creating Bookshare, which is now the largest library in the world for people who are blind or dyslexic. Jim was on the original drafting team for the Treaty of Marrakesh, the first pro-consumer intellectual property treaty passed by the United Nations.
In 2018, Jim founded Tech Matters, as a tech for good nonprofit. Tech Matters builds technology for social good movement, helping social change leaders use tech to achieve impact at scale. Tech Matters has built Aselo, a shared modern contact center for crisis response helplines; Terraso, software for smallholders and locally-led sustainability initiatives responding to climate change; and the Better Deal for Data, a data governance movement.
His first book, Technology for Good: How Nonprofit Leaders Are Using Software and Data to Solve Our Most Pressing Social Problems, publishes on September 2, 2025, and is available for pre-order now.
Through his work as a trailblazer in the field of social entrepreneurship, Jim continues advancing his vision of a world in which the benefits of technology reach all of humanity, not just the wealthiest and most able ten percent.
Meredith Broussard
Data journalist Meredith Broussard is a professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University, research director at the NYU Alliance for Public Interest Technology, and the author of several award-winning books, including “More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech” and “Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World.” Her academic research focuses on artificial intelligence in investigative reporting and ethical AI, with a particular interest in using data analysis for social good. She appeared in the 2020 documentary Coded Bias, an official selection of the Sundance Film Festival that was nominated for an Emmy Award and an NAACP Image Award.
Dr. Broussard’s work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, New America, the Institute of Museum & Library Services, and the Tow Center at Columbia Journalism School. A former features editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, she has also worked as a software developer at AT&T Bell Labs and the MIT Media Lab. Her features and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Slate, and other outlets.