Imagination as a Tool for Change | Francesca Rossi on Intelligence, Ethics, and What Comes Next

What if the most important question in AI is not how intelligent we can make machines, but what we want that intelligence to do for us? In this episode of B The Way Forward, Brenda Darden Wilkerson sits down with Francesca Rossi, IBM Fellow and IBM's Global Leader for Responsible AI and AI Governance at the T.J.

Watson Research Center, for a conversation about AI ethics, AI governance, and the human decisions behind every system we build. Francesca spent more than 20 years as a computer science professor advancing AI capability, before a year at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute changed the questions she was asking.

She explains why AI ethics is really human ethics, why governance works like brakes and seat belts rather than a speed limit on innovation, and why the language fluency of large language models should never be confused with reasoning. She and Brenda dig into whose values get embedded in a model and who gets to fine tune them, what happens to democracy and the legal system when people can no longer tell what is true, and why the greatest threat to human agency may be the steady accumulation of small decisions we hand over without noticing.

This is a conversation that sits right at the center of this season's theme of presence, passion, and purpose, because the future of artificial intelligence is not something arriving on its own. It is something we are building, one choice at a time.

Connect with Francesca on LinkedIn We Learned About: Human agency as a measure of progress Gaps in training data How AI ethics is Human ethics What AI is teaching us about ourselves Chapters: 00:00 Just because we can build it, should we? 02:09 The bigger question behind 20 years of AI research 05:28 Leaving a tenured professorship for IBM 06:28 AI ethics is human ethics 10:45 Governance is the brakes, not the speed limit 12:19 What do we actually mean by intelligence? 15:13 Fluency is not reasoning 17:30 Why we anthropomorphize machines 21:36 What technologists miss about consequences 24:09 Business, government, research, and community in one room 29:15 Whose values get built into the model 32:44 The maieutic machine: AI that asks us questions 35:26 Serving humanity means expanding human agency 40:59 What gives Francesca hope 43:01 Deepfakes, jobs, and the risk of AI rejection 46:10 What AI is doing to how we learn 48:23 What working on AI taught her about humanity #BTheWayForward #AnitaB #FrancescaRossi #AIEthics #ResponsibleAI #AIGovernance #IBM #ArtificialIntelligence #HumanAgency #TrustworthyAI #GenerativeAI #AgenticAI #TechLeadership #WomenInTech #WomenInAI #FutureOfWork #AIandSociety #EthicalTech