Director, SocietyInside

Hilary runs London-based not-for-profit SocietyInside. The name is a riff on the famous brand ‘IntelInside’ and its focus is the desire that innovation should have the needs and values of people and planet at its heart - not simply the making of money or scientific kudos.

She explores the issues of trust, ethics, values and governance of technology (AI, robotics, synthetic biology and gene editing, nanotech and neurotech) through collaborative research, exploring trustworthy collaborative process design, coaching and public speaking. She also acts as a critical friend to organisations of all types seeking to build trustworthy organisations.

She is director of the TIGTech Initiative which explores trustworthiness and trust in the governance of technology, supported by the World Economic Forum and funded by Germany’s Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft – Europe’s largest application-oriented research group. She was previously co-chair of the World Economic Forum Global Future Council on Values, Ethics & Innovation and a member of its Agile Governance Council, its Human Rights Council and its Nanotechnology Global Agenda Council. She participated in the WEF Davos meeting in 2019 speaking and facilitating sessions exploring trust and responsibility of science and technology innovation.

Hilary is also on the advisory board of the Carnegie Council on AI and Equality, an advisor to the International Congress on for the Governance of Artificial Intelligence; Member of the SPRITE Network exploring Security, Privacy, Identity, Trust in the Digital Economy; and was one of the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics in 2021. She is on the working group of the European Centre for Not-For-Profit Law Mozilla sponsored project on Harnessing the civic voice in AI impact assessment; the advisory board of Warwick University research initiative ‘Anthropogenic Global Catastrophic Risk: The Challenge of Governance’ and the H2020 Sockets Project on involvement of citizens and stakeholders in eHealth, Circular Economy and Industrial Automation.

She writes for the website Apolitical dedicated to supporting public servants on Trust and governance and is fascinated by the role of language in trust and responsibility with a workshop and series of articles for them on ‘Bullshit - why we do it and how to stop’!

Publications include: Primer on Principles for Responsible Innovation commissioned by the DG Research and Innovation for the European Commission; Trust and Tech Governance - Towards a more engaged, collaborative, communicative approach; Building Trusted Environments for Collaborative Governance; Building Confidence in Innovative Technologies - what stakeholders expect and how companies can respond; a commission from Forum for the Future on Industrial biotech - Trustworthiness Builds Trust, Trust Builds Confidence and Confidence Builds Markets and an academic paper with RIVM in Netherlands on a Safe Innovation Approach: Towards an agile system for dealing with innovations

She can be contacted at hilary@societyinside.com on Twitter @hilarysutcliffe or LinkedIn @HilarySutcliffe

For more information see www.societyinside.com or SocietyInside YouTube channel