2026 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate: The Rise and Reckoning of AI

Chris Callison-Burch is a professor in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania, where his course on Artificial Intelligence has one of the highest enrollments at the university, with more than 500 students each fall. His research focuses on large language models, and he has applied them to problems ranging from education to computational social science to automated scientific discovery.

Callison-Burch has more than 200 publications, which have been cited over 35,000 times. He has received faculty research awards from Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, and Roblox, and in 2023, testified before Congress about generative AI.

Kate Crawford is a leading scholar of AI. She’s a distinguished professor at University of Southern California, a senior principal at Microsoft Research, and inaugural chair of AI & Justice at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Her best-selling book Atlas of AI won multiple prizes and was named a book of the year by the Financial Times.

Her latest project, Calculating Empires, won the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2025 and the European Commission’s grand prize for science and technology. TIME named her as one of the most 100 influential people in AI.

Eric Schmidt, KBE, chair and CEO of Relativity Space, is best known for his pivotal role in the growth of Google, where, as CEO and chairman, he oversaw the company’s transformation from a small startup to one of the world’s most influential companies from 2001 to 2011. Under his leadership, alongside Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the company dramatically scaled its infrastructure and diversified its products while maintaining a strong culture of innovation.

In 2021, Eric founded the Special Competitive Studies Project, a non-profit initiative focused on strengthening America’s long-term AI and technological competitiveness in national security, the economy, and society.

Most recently in 2024, Eric and his wife Wendy co-founded Schmidt Sciences, a nonprofit organization working to advance science and technology that deepens human understanding of the natural world and develops solutions to global issues.

He has written several acclaimed books, including his latest New York Times bestseller Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit (2024), co-written with the late Henry Kissinger and Craig Mundie, and is among the most prominent voices on technology, AI, business, and philanthropy.

Nate Soares, president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) and co-author of the New York Times bestseller, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All, has been working in the field of artificial intelligence for over a decade. He is the author of a large body of technical and semi-technical writing on AI alignment, including foundational work on value learning, decision theory, and power-seeking incentives in smarter-than-human AIs.

Soares previously worked as an engineer at Google and Microsoft, as a research associate at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and as a contractor for the U.S. Department of Defense. Additionally, his work grapples with the challenges and existential threats that AI poses to humanity.

Latanya Sweeney is the Daniel Paul Professor of the Practice of Government and Technology at the Harvard Kennedy School, director and founder of both the Public Interest Tech Lab and Data Privacy Lab, editor-in-chief of Technology Science, and the former chief technology officer at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.

She has three patents and more than 100 academic publications and pioneered the field known as data privacy, launched the emerging area known as algorithmic fairness, and has been cited in U.S. federal medical privacy regulation, known as HIPAA.

She is a recipient of the prestigious Louis D. Brandeis Privacy Award and the American Psychiatric Association's Privacy Advocacy Award, and she is an elected fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics.

She earned her Ph.D. degree in computer science from MIT in 2001, the first Black woman to do so. Sweeney creates and uses technology to assess and solve societal, political, and governance problems and teaches others how to do the same.

Cynthia Rush is an associate professor in the Department of Statistics at Columbia University. Her research uses tools and ideas from information theory, statistical physics, and applied probability as a framework for understanding modern challenges related to learning from data in fields of statistics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.

She received her Ph.D. in statistics from Yale University and completed her undergraduate coursework in mathematics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.