The in-person event took place at The Foundry in London on December 13 2023, and included a panel on how AI and new tech are shaping philanthropy. This was followed by a workshop for in-person attendees focused on the four Alliance special feature topics in 2023.

The panel was also livestreamed to our global audience, and you can watch the full replay below.

Moderated by Charles Keidan, executive editor of Alliance, the speakers included:

• Tim Gardam, CEO of the Nuffield Foundation, which established the Ada Lovelace Institute in 2018
• Rosa Curling, founder of Foxglove, a philanthropy backed organisation taking legal action against the abuses of power by big technology companies

A few highlights from the event

Tim: The one thing I think a grant maker and a foundation must always be aware of is, just because you’ve got the cash, it doesn’t mean you’ve got the ideas. And if you try to be too directing, the good people don’t come near you, because they think they’re going to be told what to do. What I do think though, in this field, it has been quite interesting how in some of our really big, impressive grants — I’m thinking… the Resolution Foundation’s work on Stagnation Nation — we funded that. The Deaton review of aspects of inequality in the 21st century — we funded that. There’s not a chapter in Deaton (it’s a magisterial piece of work) on digital inequalities… there’s no one chapter there about the implications of AI for society. It’s quite interesting that that public social policy and the economists’ perspectives don’t intersect naturally with the data scientists’ perspectives. And so we haven’t had many ideas coming to us on this theme, and I think that’s a problem.

Rosa: We decided to set up Foxglove as a nonprofit litigation company that is trying to challenge both the government’s use of data and technology, which is abusive and exploitative, but also the companies’. And we felt very strongly that there were lots of internal ethical panels happening in Meta, or in Google Alphabet, and actually absolutely no one was suing them. And there were a lot of conversations about privacy, which is wonderful and incredibly important, but actually there was a lack of conversation about the power that these companies now have over us. Because I think these companies are now dictating our public squares; they are massively involved in our economies. We find the people we have relationships with, we find our jobs — the internet is everywhere and technology is everywhere. And it’s within our lives, and it dominates our lives. And actually the power is held in the handful of corporations.

You can watch the full video here:

Eleanor Margolis is a freelance journalist