Frontier stage
Keynote
In person
LeadersGoldDiscovery

LLMs: Mercenary or citizen?

  • Date
    9 July 2026
    Timeframe
    10:30 - 11:00 CEST
    Duration
    30 minutes
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    A year after my mother’s house burned in the Altadena fires, I watched her spend her days doing unpaid busywork for a chatbot she calls “Chat” — humans working for the AI, not the other way around. It made me ask an old question in a new way. Plutarch praised the general who would “enroll soldiers, not buy them,” because a mercenary has no skin in the game. Does an LLM? It turns out you can’t threaten something you can copy — so our most powerful tools may be structurally incapable of the stakes that make an agent trustworthy. Drawing on Plutarch and Aristotle, this keynote asks whether AI can ever be a citizen — a member of our community with something to lose — or whether it stands forever outside the city, and what we owe each other if it does.

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