Political Salon hosted by Action Labs as a part of #SFTechWeek
What if AI could be more than a threat to democracy—and instead become a powerful tool for strengthening it?
In this interactive two-hour session, we’ll explore practical ways ordinary people can use AI to become more informed, make government more transparent, organize communities, hold powerful institutions accountable, and make their voices heard. Through hands-on activities and small-group challenges, participants will experiment with using AI to understand complex...
Yue Lin is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, with a Designated Emphasis on Political Economy.
In the dissertation, Yue studies an extreme version of economic de-globalization: the rising trend of advanced democracies leveraging national security to restrict multinational enterprises from both emerging and established markets. She documents the political origins of this growing trend in U.S. Congress, and the socio-political strategies multinational corporations adopt to mitigate geopolitical risks. Her dissertation received the...
April 09, 2026| 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM|820 Social Sciences BuildingCloud Capitalism and the AI TransitionWith Kathy Thelen, Ford Professor of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Join MIT political scientist Kathy Thelen at BESI as she explores the origins and implications of the new cloud business model powering the AI boom. She’ll elaborate on how this model differs from the traditional platform model out of which it grew, as well as the technological, political, and distributional impacts of the rise of this new business model. She...
