The Trentino Brief

<p>In spring 2023, a group of expert scientists, educationists, academics, policymakers, investors, and technologists gathered in the town of Trentino in Südtirol, a charming Alpine region constituted by Italy, Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. They came together as a fact-finding and policy research group referred to as the Trentino Group, after the series of reports, collectively referred to as the Trentino Brief, they would collaboratively author. Their mission, funded in part by discreet European and North American family foundations, would unfold over several years to address convergent problems facing the future of AI. With AI technologies showing promise in various scientific domains, the group considered harms to human populations present and future, environmental costs, disruption of work, education, and other industries to be serious matters that had to be reckoned with. This essay is pieced together by a research and secretarial assistance network adjacent to the inner circle of the Trentino Group. Not all members of this network know each other; they assembled this work collectively and anonymously based on documents secreted into a shared online folder. The essay reconstructs some of the group’s early discussions for the first report of <em>The Trentino Brief</em>, which were, unfortunately, lost in the intervening years; it focuses on a set of interconnected problems, and significant opportunities, between higher education, particularly, the humanities, and generative AI…</p>