AI & Society: Harnessing the Good and Minimizing the Bad

Posted October 14, 2026

AI is poised to revolutionize medicine, energy, business, and much more. It’s also poised to create radical societal change and is sparking apprehension about what comes next.

The positive and negative potential of AI was the focus of the first Georgia Tech AI & Society Series event, hosted by the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts and the Michael E. Tennenbaum Family Institute for Technology and Civic Leadership on Oct. 8.

“How do we harness the technology for good and minimize the bad?” said Georgia Tech Provost Raheem Beyah in his opening remarks. Understanding and planning for AI-driven societal changes will require a knowledge of history, economics, communication, and so much more — subjects grounded in the humanities and social sciences, he said.

“No better place than Georgia Tech, and no better college than the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts to lead the discussion,” he added.

The panel, “We, the People, and AI: The Future of Data, Energy, Health, and Human Rights,” was moderated by Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts Dean Amanda Murdie and included Wendy H. Wong, Professor, University of British Columbia – Okanagan Campus; Caroline Gwynn Monagle, Vice President, Strategic Initiatives, R1 RCM; and Marilyn A. Brown, Regents’ and Brook Byers Professor, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy.

One focus of the evening was data privacy. Many people are giving AI agents and other systems more and more access to their private information in the name of convenience and efficiency.

Wong, author of the book “We, the Data: Human Rights in the Digital Age,” discussed how our digital lives create massive amounts of data being collected, analyzed, bought, and sold.

“I think about data as sticky, like literally like gum on the bottom of your shoe. Really easy to make … and really hard to get off,” Wong said.

Individuals often lack access and control of data being created about them.

“The data about you don’t belong to you. They belong to the data collector,” she said.

AI has only accelerated this data collection and intensifies the need to explore whether human rights should be extended to cover our digital data.

“AI is not happening to you. AI is happening, and you have a way to think about what you want out of that,” Wong said. “We are all data stakeholders.”

AI’s possible impacts on energy and sustainability were also discussed. Brown, an expert in sustainable energy technologies and policy, shared what excites her about AI’s possible uses related to sustainability.

“AI can optimize the electricity grid. It can improve industrial processes, reduce waste, predict equipment failures, [and] help integrate variable renewable energy into the system,” Brown said.

Meanwhile, AI’s high consumption of energy is a challenge yet to be overcome and could produce unequal environmental and economic impacts, Brown said.

“My concern is that we’re not paying attention to who’s going to bear the consequences of all of that pollution relative to who is going to be benefiting from the economic growth and wealth of AI.”

From medical breakthroughs to doctors taking AI notes during appointments, AI’s influence on health and medicine was also discussed.

Monagle, a leader in the healthcare technology and services industry, discussed how AI is improving processes around healthcare and insurance but also cautioned that only certain functions could be ceded to technology and that human expertise was still very valuable in the healthcare space.

“We still have to be the ones in the driver’s seat, and that means we still have to be experts in our fields. We can’t just rely on AI to tell us everything,” Monagle said.

Higher education, and the liberal arts in particular, have an important role to play in training future professionals to consider factors beyond just technology and the bottom line when implementing AI and other technologies in their fields, Monagle said.

“It’s important that universities teach people to step back and think holistically about what we are building. Why are we building it? What is it going to achieve? Is this aligned with our values? And what are our values?” said Monagle.