Timeline and outputs

NHNAI project aims at triggering ethical capacity-building among concerned stakholders – i.e. individuals and organisations such as public institutions and private organizations, academics, engineers, economic actors, policy- and decision-makers, any concerned citizens – by settling, sustaining and enriching societal reflection upon the question of humanism at the time of NS and AI within debate communities in 8 different countries (Taiwan, Kenya, Chile, USA, Belgium, Italia, Portugal and France).

To reach this goal, NHNAI deploys 4 main activities:

Activity 1 (January 2022 – December 2022) focuses upon interweaving all participants to NHNAI project (academic as well as extra-academic participants), to build a shared common ground for further ethical-capacity building. It involves in particular:

• An interdisciplinary dialogue among the academic experts (including theology and religious studies)
• A transdisciplinary dialogue between NHNAI academic and extra-academic participants to put academic expertise (with its integral approach) at the service of societal stakeholders (notably through aligning academic expertise with societal actors concerns).

Activity 2 (June 2022 – April 2024) is devoted to the reinforcement of ethical capacities among stakeholders communities participating to NHNAI project through the facilitation of two waves of collective reflection. The goal is to produce shared understanding about humanism at the time of NS and AI among NHNAI participants, and thereby to trigger their ethical awareness and expectation about societal issues raised by NS and AI.

Activity 3 ensures refinement and dissemination of the results of this collective reflection, producing bottom-up recommendations for ethical regulation of NS and AI societal issues that will be spread at national and international levels to policy and decision makers, to economic and industrial actors, to the academic world and the Church institutions as well as to the wider audience (February 2023 – August 2025). This activity 3 also includes communication and dissemination efforts all along the project.

Activity 4 (January 2022 – August 2025) will lay infrastructure that will allow the pursuit of this capacity-building mission in years to come. NHNAI will conduct an effort of evaluation and learning that will produce a study of the key factors of success for its process of reinforcement of concerned stakeholders ethical capacities and to participate to ethical reflection and regulation effort with respect to AI and NS developments. NHNAI will also emit guidelines for (Catholic) Higher Education Institutions to improve their ability at training actors of such processes.

With these 4 activities, NHNAI will reach several milestones and produce multiple deliverables. Among them, one can highlight:

• July 2022 – Transdisciplinary mapping of academic knowledge: this mapping exposes questions about humanism at the time of NS and AI (in the three fields of education, health and democracy) that were emitted by NHNAI societal participants (especially industrial partners) and propose a review of academic insights that are relevant to explore these societal questions.
• April 2024 – Report on the two waves of collective reflection : this report proposes a synthetic view of contributions to the collective debates about humanism at the time of NS and AI, focusing on the 3 fields of education, health and democracy.
• January 2025 – White paper on bottom-up recommendations for ethical guidelines and policymaking : this white paper lists recommendations associated with relevant syntheses from digital debates and connected with NHNAI participants’ contributions to these debates.
• January 2025 – Humanism days : each partnering institutions that hosts collective reflection and debate with societal stakeholders organizes a humanism day to disseminate NHNAI’s results and methodology to wider audience.
• August 2025 – Guidelines for training products : these guidelines expose the main elements that should be integrated within the trainings of actors and facilitators of collective ethical reflection at the university – society interface.