Civic Engagement in an Era of Artificial Intelligence

Renée Sieber is an associate professor at McGill University. Since she graduated from the Bloustein School, she has investigated the intersection of civic empowerment and computational technologies. She is best known for her research and practice on public participation geographic information systems and also has conducted research on participatory climate modeling. She currently researches civic engagement related to artificial intelligence. She co-hosts the monthly Al in Canadian Municipalities Community of Practice, now in its sixth year, where cities exchange best practices on Al use. She has collaborated
with numerous federal agencies and organizations in Canada on Al policy. She has advised on the design of two Al risk assessment tools and served on the IEEE working group on Al procurement. She sits on the executive boards of GIScience and Computational Urban Planning and Urban Management.

Artificial intelligence is sold as a miraculous cure to many of the ills of cities, one of which is a lack of civic (local) engagement. Al can summarize and translate civic participation and even synthesize participants if desired. Add to that, cities may be reluctant to engage citizens on Al-its deployment, impacts, and overall policy-because engagement supposedly slows Al adoption and because the tech contains all these contradictions. It’s opaque and can only be understood by data scientists. But it seems effortless to use, with chatbots and software libraries. Humans can and should be in the loop but autonomous agents will save cities time and money. On top of all of that, Al, especially generative Al, exerts an enormous impact on people’s lives so citizens should be involved. But governments exist in a FOMO (fear of missing out) world, where they feel the need to optimize with Al, less they miss their competitive advantage. This lecture will discuss these challenges and explore numerous ways that citizens can engage with cities on Al. It will also cover the dark side of Al with regard to civic engagement.

This talk draws on Dr. Sieber’s research at the intersection of tech and civic engagement. This interest developed in her dissertation with PhD supervisor Lyna Wiggins, who emphasized local adoption by planners of GIS, which at the time was hard! Throughout her career, she has been driven to investigate the potential for civic engagement using hard tech, especially as the discourse moves towards tech as the engine of innovation, for example in smart cities. In this she will draw on her six years co-hosting Al in Canadian Municipalities Community of Practice as well as 20+ years researching public participation GIS.

RSVP AT go.rutgers.edu/meck2025