Our Final Frontier? Star Trek and the Post-AI Society

• Presented by Hopkins at Home and the Johns Hopkins Data Science and AI Institute •
• Featuring Mark Dredze, Director of the Johns Hopkins Data Science and AI Institute and John C. Malone Professor and Darcie Draudt-Véjares, KSAS '18 (MA), '21 (PhD) •

A Star Trek Day conversation on automation, work, scarcity, and human purpose

Long before modern artificial intelligence, large language models, or autonomous systems entered our daily lives, Star Trek envisioned a 24th-century world fundamentally transformed by ambient compute power, automation, and AI infrastructure. In Gene Roddenberry's utopian vision, technology solved basic resource scarcity and eliminated routine labor—giving rise to a "post-work" society where human success was no longer measured by wealth or survival, but by purpose, craftsmanship, exploration, and self-actualization.

As we stand on the precipice of a new industrial revolution driven by rapid breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, we may be approaching a threshold that Star Trek has long invited us to imagine. As AI takes on increasingly complex cognitive and physical tasks, we face profound questions about our collective future: What is the role of people in a post-AI world? How do we maintain purpose and relevance when algorithms redefine labor? And what governance frameworks do we need to ensure technological abundance benefits everyone?

Celebrate Star Trek Day with Hopkins at Home for a captivating virtual conversation bridging cutting-edge computer science and global technology policy. Featuring Dr. Mark Dredze, John C. Malone Professor and Inaugural Director of the Johns Hopkins Data Science and AI Institute, alongside moderator Dr. Darcie Draudt-Véjares (A&S '21 PhD), Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, this panel will move beyond sci-fi tropes of androids and rogue machines to examine how automation is reshaping societal productivity, what it means to find human relevance in an automated age, and how research at Johns Hopkins is helping steer our technological future toward human flourishing.

ABOUT Mark Dredze
Director of the Johns Hopkins Data Science and AI Institute and John C. Malone Professor

Mark Dredze is a John C. Malone Professor of Computer Science and the director of the Data Science and AI Institute at the Johns Hopkins University. He develops artificial intelligence systems based on natural language processing and explores their applications to public health and medicine.

His research centers around statistical models of language with applications to social media analysis, public health, and clinical informatics. Within natural language processing he focuses on statistical methods for information extraction, but has considered a wide range of NLP tasks, including syntax, semantics, sentiment, and spoken language processing. Dredze’s work in public health addresses the areas of tobacco control, vaccinations, infectious disease surveillance, mental health, drug use, and gun violence prevention. He also develops new methods for clinical NLP on medical records.

He is affiliated with multiple Johns Hopkins institutions, among them the Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare and the Center for Language and Speech Processing; he also holds a joint appointment in the School of Medicine’s Biomedical Informatics & Data Science Section in the Department of Medicine within the Division of General Internal Medicine.

Dredze has pioneered new applications in public health informatics and is the author or co-author on more than 350 papers in scholarly publications, including the Journal of the American Medical Association, the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Vaccine, and the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. His work is regularly covered by major media outlets, including NPR, The New York Times, and CNN.

ABOUT Dr. Darcie Draudt-Véjares
Fellow for Korean Studies, Asia Program, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Dr. Darcie Draudt-Véjares, A&S '21 (PhD), is a Fellow for Korean Studies in the Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC. A political scientist and policy analyst, she publishes regular commentary on South and North Korean domestic politics and foreign policy, Northeast Asian relations, and US-Korea policy.

Outside of her day job, Draudt-Véjares is deeply interested in science fiction and speculative fiction as media that interrogates our current political and social problems and explores future and alternative approaches to emerging and deep-seated challenges. At JHU she taught an undergraduate course titled 'Understanding Diplomacy through Star Trek,' drawing connections between speculative power structures and real-world international relations.

Dr. Draudt-Véjares holds a PhD in Political Science from the Johns Hopkins University, an MA in Korean Studies from the Yonsei University Graduate School of International Studies, and an AB with Honors in Anthropology from Davidson College

Event Date
Friday, September 11, 2026
Start Time: 12:00pm EDT
End Time: 1:00pm EDT

Location
Virtual Livestream

Hopkins at Home
Livestream

Contact
Office of Alumni Relations
Joe Letourneau
Lifelong Learning
(800) JHU-JHU1
HopkinsatHome@jhu.edu

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