David Guston, Associate Vice Provost and Foundation Professor, School for the Future of Innovation in Society in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory, Rob Walton College of Global Futures, with Arizona Talks on April 16, 2026.
Arizona Talks, an organization dedicated to civic dialogue, debuted a new salon format at Greenwood Brewing in downtown Phoenix. AZ Talks invited Dave Guston to speak on "AI, work, and the public good." In his remarks, Guston emphasized that, regardless of how transformative we think AI might be, that technologies are the result of human choices, that work in large part because they are part of systems, that we make technologies for our own purposes but those technologies often then require our care and response, and that technologies -- like laws -- are part of how we structure society to help us purse what we think is good, individually and collectively.
Says Guston: This Arizona Talks conversation is just one part of a larger, urgent civic dialogue we need to be having about AI.
Guston offers the following acknowledgments:
Jered Scrivner and his colleagues at Arizona Talks for inviting me to speak and hosting me at this event.
