September 29, 2025, by Brigitte Nerlich

Participation at the core: AI, ELSI and community engagement

Alondra Nelson, a sociologist, STS scholar and expert on AI policy and ethics, recently published a letter in Science proposing that artificial intelligence (AI) should adopt the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications (ELSI) framework from genomics, an approach designed to put social concerns at the heart of technology governance. Nelson argues that meaningful community engagement must be central to ELSI for AI, not just peripheral. In this post, I use this letter as a springboard to deepen my reflections on potential linguistic and epistemic obstacles to public engagement with AI and to broaden discussions of human oversight, alignment and ethical decision making in AI. To continue reading this post, please follow this link

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