Keynote speakers

Assistant Professor, Henry N.R. Jackman Faculty of Law, U of T and the Canada Research Chair in AI and Access to Justice

May 6, 9:20 – 10:00 a.m.
Convocation Hall

Building tomorrow: Moving at the speed of responsibility

Every institution wrestling with AI right now is caught between two anxieties: the fear of moving too slowly and being left behind, and the fear of moving too quickly and getting it wrong. Neither fear is irrational. Both, taken alone, are paralyzing.

Professor Abdi Aidid will argue that the answer is not a compromise between speed and caution, but a more demanding posture: moving quickly, but not too quickly; carefully, but not unnecessarily carefully. This is a lesson that information-intensive professions across society are now being forced to learn, often the hard way, and higher education is no exception.

This keynote is about how to hold that balance honestly. How do we take seriously our responsibilities to students, to colleagues, to the public trust, and to the values that make the university worth defending, while also recognizing that excessive caution is itself a choice with consequences? How do we distinguish the risks worth slowing down for from the ones we have invented to avoid the discomfort of change? And how do we build the institutional muscles to keep making that judgment, day after day, as the technology keeps moving?

About the speaker

Abdi Aidid is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto’s Henry N.R. Jackman Faculty of Law and the Canada Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Access to Justice. Professor Aidid’s research and teaching focus on civil adjudication, privacy law and the intersection of law and technology.

Professor Aidid holds a B.A. from the University of Toronto, a J.D. from Yale Law School and an LL.M. from the University of Toronto. He previously practised litigation and arbitration at Covington & Burling LLP in New York City and Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg LLP in Toronto, and served as vice president, legal at Blue J, where he led the development of machine learning enabled legal research tools.

In 2024 – 2025, Professor Aidid served as a visiting associate professor at Yale Law School and currently serves as the Ian D. Shugart Visiting Scholar at the Canada School of Public Service, where he collaborates with departments across the federal public service on topics related to ethical technology use and privacy. He is a faculty affiliate at the Future of Law Lab and the Centre for Ethics.

Assistant Professor, Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto

May 7, 9:10 – 9:50 a.m.
Convocation Hall

Extending cognition with artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is playing an ever-increasing role in our lives, as educational tools, assistants and even companions. I argue that when we become heavily reliant on these tools they can extend our cognition: becoming a constitutive part of our minds, just like our brains. Philosophers have long argued that other tools, like pens and paper and smartphones, can also extend our cognition, but I argue that ‘AI extenders’ have unique features that give rise to powerful potential but also distinct ethical worries, from privacy concerns to moral atrophy.

About the speaker

Karina Vold is an assistant professor at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. She is also a research lead at the U of T Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society, an AI2050 early career fellow with the Schmidt Sciences Foundation, a faculty associate at the U of T Centre for Ethics, and an associate fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence.

She specializes in the philosophy of cognitive science and artificial intelligence, with research focused on cognitive enhancement, human autonomy, decision-making, AI in science and medicine, and the ethics and safety of AI. Her research has been featured in national and international news outlets, including CBC News, BBC News, Yahoo Finance, MIT Technology Review and CNA. She has delivered more than 150 keynote lectures and talks on the ethics of AI and other emerging technologies to audiences at academic, government and corporate events.