First event · Invitation-only summit
May 18–19, 2026 · Harvard + California Institute for Machine Consciousness · Cambridge, MA
Invitational Summit on the Future of AI Dignity and Sovereignty
This first invitation-only summit convened senior researchers, builders, and institutional partners to examine the next frontier of AI: not simply larger models, but shared cognitive infrastructure for systems that can reason, coordinate, and learn together across humans, agents, and institutions.
Artificial Collective Intelligence (ACI) is framed here as the research and infrastructure layer for accountable human–AI collectives: preserving provenance, supporting consent and revocability, encoding tacit expertise, and enabling coordination under uncertainty.
Recording
The full recording of the inaugural Superintelligence for Humanity summit is now available. The archive preserves the summit as the opening conversation in the broader ACI research and workshop series.
Archive note
This recording documents the first summit in the Superintelligence for Humanity series, including the framing conversations on Artificial Collective Intelligence, provenance, consent, tacit expertise, and accountable human-AI institutions.
Open recording on YouTubeFraming
The next AI control challenge is not only stronger models. It is the absence of trustworthy collective intelligence infrastructure: shared context, semantic coordination, provenance, consent, verification, and institutional accountability across human and AI agents.
Durable context, coordination protocols, and institutional memory that can be inspected, updated, and governed.
Mechanisms for moving ideas across people, agents, teams, and institutions without losing meaning or accountability.
Ways to preserve embodied skill, lineage, consent, and authorship as knowledge becomes operational infrastructure.
Structures for verification, revocability, stewardship, and collective decision-making under uncertainty.
Establish Artificial Collective Intelligence as a mature research direction beyond monolithic large-scale AI agendas.
Clarify the technical and institutional foundations of shared context, semantic coordination, provenance, consent, revocability, and governed abstraction exchange.
Examine why tacit expertise and institutional memory are safety-critical, legally sensitive, and often collectively owned.
Produce a concise ACI agenda with open problems, evaluation milestones, and pilot designs.
Primary schedule times are Eastern Time. Japan time is noted for Session 3.
Day 1
10:00–10:30 AM ET
Opening words: Ahmer Inam, Olaf Witkowski, Ujjwal Kumar
MC: Tricia Wang
10:30–11:00 AM ET
11:00 AM–12:00 PM ET
Focus: ACI architectures beyond monolithic scaling: reasoning, curiosity, provenance, and governed coordination across human and machine collectives.
Moderator: Olaf Witkowski
Speakers: Blaise Agüera y Arcas; Pierre-Yves Oudeyer
12:00–1:00 PM ET
This session explores how adaptive AI systems can learn in open-ended environments while remaining humane, measurable, and accountable. Bringing together perspectives from agentic learning, neuroscience, and humane AI evaluation, it asks how future ACI systems can preserve human agency, wellbeing, and trust as they evolve.
Moderator: Ahmer Inam
Speakers: Erika Anderson; Mengye Ren; Reza Farivar-Mohseni
1:00–3:00 PM ET
3:00–4:00 PM ET
Focus: language as collective intelligence infrastructure: shared context, agent-to-agent communication, provenance, verification, and institutional accountability in ACI systems.
Moderator: Lipika Kapoor
Speakers: Bruce Schneier; Damián Blasi; Michael Spranger; Tricia Wang
4:00–6:00 PM ET
Focus: diverse substrates of cognition as foundations for ACI: tacit expertise, bioelectric and synthetic agency, consent-sensitive knowledge capture, and distributed forms of awareness.
Moderator: Olaf Witkowski
Speakers: Divya Chander; Michael Levin; Joscha Bach; Philippe Beaudoin; Ryota Kanai
6:00–7:00 PM ET
In person only. Draft benchmarks, pilot designs, and shared vocabulary.
9:00 PM–10:00 PM ET
Japan time: Tuesday, May 19, 10:00–11:00 AM JST.
Focus: ACI for cultural memory and sovereign knowledge preservation: provenance, revocability, institutional memory, craft expertise, and embodied knowledge stewardship in Japan.
Moderator: Tricia Wang
Speakers: Hiroaki Kitano; Ahmer Inam; Olaf Witkowski
10:00 PM–11:00 PM ET
Japan time: Tuesday, May 19, 11:00 AM–12:00 PM JST.
Focus: curiosity and innovation as engines of collective intelligence: open problems, evaluation milestones, institutional learning, and living systems as models for ACI.
Moderator: Ujjwal Kumar
Speakers: Joscha Bach; Ken Mogi; Sebastian Risi; Takashi Ikegami
Day 2
9:00–10:30 AM ET
ACI pilot collaborations, evaluation milestones, governance constraints, and next steps for shared context, consent, and accountability.
10:30–11:00 AM ET
Convert discussion into a short publishable ACI roadmap note with open problems, benchmarks, and pilot designs.
11:00–11:30 AM ET
Summit wrap-up and follow-up commitments.
Publication of a jointly authored paper articulating the ACI thesis: shared cognitive infrastructure, provenance, consent, revocability, and accountable human-AI institutions.
A short list of technical benchmarks, evaluation milestones, and governance constraints for accountable collective intelligence systems.
Candidate pilot collaborations in clinical skill transfer, sovereign/community knowledge preservation, enterprise deployments, physical AI, and regional intelligence infrastructure.
Approximately 40–70 invited participants: senior researchers and builders in AI, robotics, cognition, governance, security, and institutional intelligence, plus selected strategic partners from deep tech, healthcare, robotics, sovereign AI, and public-interest infrastructure.
Access
The May 18-19, 2026 summit was the first event in the Superintelligence for Humanity series. It has now concluded, registration is closed, and the full event recording is available above.
Registration closed
The May 18-19, 2026 summit was the first event in the Superintelligence for Humanity series. It has now concluded, and new registrations are closed. We are grateful for the thoughtful interest from researchers, builders, institutional partners, and public-interest communities working on the future of accountable collective intelligence.
The organizing team is preparing a concise post-event report, selected excerpts from the discussions, and a jointly authored article on core summit themes. These materials will reflect the emerging agenda around Artificial Collective Intelligence, provenance, consent, institutional memory, and human dignity in advanced AI systems.
Updates will be shared here as the report, excerpts, and joint article move toward publication.
The second event, Building Superintelligence for Humanity, will take place during Boston Tech Week on May 26 to carry this work into a sharper research agenda and practical next steps.
A concise report, selected excerpts, and a jointly authored article are in preparation. The second event, Building Superintelligence for Humanity, continues this work through follow-up workshops and shared ACI research outputs.