PANEL - IEEE Women in Engineering

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to advance at an unprecedented pace, human civilization is confronting a shift with no historical precedent: for the first time, the most capable reasoning systems in the room may not be human. AI is already outperforming human experts in medicine, law, scientific discovery, and strategic decision-making. This transition raises questions that go far beyond data privacy or algorithmic bias, it challenges the very foundations of human agency, scientific authority, and civilizational safety.

This panel will examine the scientific implications of a world where human intelligence is no longer the highest-performing intelligence. Three core challenges will structure the discussion: cognitive displacement, or the point at which AI superior reasoning becomes a systemic risk to human autonomy; the alignment problem, which asks how we ensure that systems outperforming us still optimize for outcomes that are good for humans, and epistemic dependence, which interrogates what happens to independent human scientific judgment when AI generates conclusions faster and more accurately than we can verify. Together, these challenges reframe the central question of AI safety, from “how do we protect people from AI?” to “how do we preserve human agency alongside an intelligence that outperforms us?”.

This panel is organized and sponsored by the IEEE Women In Engineering (WIE) Affinity Group of the IEEE Italy Section and the IEEE Women In Engineering (WIE) Affinity Group of the IEEE Germnay Section. A key objective is therefore to highlight the contributions of women researchers, engineers, and scientists who are shaping the frontier of AI safety. A future in which humanity and advanced AI coexist requires both technical rigor and diverse perspectives; building that future equitably and safely is a responsibility that belongs to all of us.

Valentina Bello

University of Pavia, Italy

• valentina.bello@unipv.it

Oumayma Kahouli

Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany

• oumayma.kahouli@etit.tu-chemnitz.de