Pittsburgh students pitch bill to tackle AI displacement
Pittsburgh students pitch bill to tackle AI displacement
https://www.wesa.fm/health-science-tech/2026-03-02/pittsburgh-ai-hackathon4humanity-duquesne
Publish Date: 2026-03-02 05:33:00
Source Domain: www.wesa.fm
When college students are asked what they would do to try to use AI to build a more ethical world, what happens?
It’s the question put to students during this year’s “Hacking4Humanity,” an annual event hosted on Duquesne University’s campus with the goal of solving tech problems.
The hackathon started in 2019 with Pitt Cyber, but John Slattery, executive director of the Carl G. Grefenstette Center at Duquesne, said it eventually “died off.” The Uptown-based university picked it back up in 2022, reframing the event as one big Pittsburgh student hackathon open to college students from schools throughout the region.
“Traditionally, hackathons are largely sort of corporate and everything’s about making a startup that’ll get bought by one of the big tech companies — hopefully Google sees it and buys it for a million dollars,” Slattery said. “We want to do something different.”
This year, the theme was Challenging AI Injustice, Building Ethical Futures and the hackathon had two competition “tracks”: one for policymaking and another for developing technology, such as an app.
Nathan Reynolds, a Duquesne student who was part of “Team W9,” proposed a statewide policy that would standardize AI-use practices throughout K-12 schools to make AI access equitable and require educational programming for students and educators. He was inspired by his mom’s stories as a database administrator for a Chester County school district about the effects of unchecked, poorly understood AI usage.
“They’re already dealing with the adverse effects of kids using artificial intelligence to cheat, using artificial intelligence to think critically for them as opposed to thinking critically by themselves,” Reynolds said. “We want to provide a basis for them to understand what AI is.”
Reynolds said he also wanted to address the problem of smaller schools not having the budgets to give students equitable access to…
