Marisa of Open Channel Culture- Human Arts Lab, Global Alliance for Digital Education and Sustainability, IEEE Co-Chair AI Ethics Education Committee & Chair Global Methodologies, Planet Positive 2030

AI ethics has a gap that most engineers are unaware of. The dominant frameworks governing responsible AI, from IEEE's Ethically Aligned Design to the EU AI Act to corporate ethics guidelines, address the outputs of AI systems: their fairness, their transparency, their compliance. They ask what the system does yet we are just beginning to understand the full impacts, the critical complex risks of users’ interaction with AI systems across sectors, cultures and generations.

This webinar session introduces the concept of the Human Readiness Gap: the systemic lag between the pace of AI design, development and deployment and the preparation of the human beings who use, depend on, and are governed by AI systems. Drawing on cognitive science, clinical psychology, and social research, it presents evidence-backed research of AI's effects on human cognition, psychological safety, and social-relational impacts, effects that existing practices do not address.

Responsible AI use of AI systems is not primarily a technical or policy skill. It is an awareness and understanding of human preparation and readiness to interact with AI systems, not limited to, but especially generative AI systems. A technically sound system designed without these in mind and deployed to an unprepared human population has increased risk of producing unethical ethical outcomes to intended and unintended users. And engineers, as the designers of these systems, are positioned to help address it first.

The session examines the leading AI ethics frameworks and practices through a structural lens: what they measure, what they assume, and what is left out. The consistent finding that the interior experience of the human user, how AI reshapes judgment, erodes agency, or restructures relationships, falls outside the scope of every major framework currently in practice. This webinar makes the case that this omission is not peripheral. It is the central challenge of responsible AI deployment in the decade ahead and into the future.

Biography:

Marisa Zalabak is an educational psychologist, AI ethicist, and transdisciplinary practice leader with more than three decades of experience spanning education, organizational psychology, and technology ethics. She is Founder and CEO of Open Channel Culture- Human Arts Lab and Co-Founder of the Global Alliance for Digital Education and Sustainability (GADES).

Within IEEE, Marisa has contributed to SSIT standards addressing technology and human wellbeing, serves as Co-Chair of the IEEE AI Ethics Education Committee, and chairs the Global Methodologies Committee for the Planet Positive 2030 initiative. Her work spans AI ethics, digital education, sustainability, human wellbeing, and the future of education and workforce systems. She is an active contributor to global standards bodies, advisory boards, and initiatives advancing responsible, humanity-centered technology — including the Global Digital Compact, UNESCO, UNEP, All Tech Is Human, and K–12 public education systems.

Prior to her work in technology, Marisa built an extensive career as a leadership and implementation strategist in organizational and educational psychology, serving as an adaptive leadership advisor to businesses and educational institutions and a consultant to private-sector organizations. A specialist in transdisciplinary collaboration and creative intelligence, she has partnered with the CUNY Lincoln Center Institute's Capacities for Imaginative Learning program. As an educational and instructional designer, she has delivered professional development to thousands of teachers, support staff, and mental health professionals across more than 500 New York City schools — spanning early childhood through higher education. She currently serves as a faculty member of Trocadero Forum Institute, a Resident Fellow with The Digital Economist and is co-leading a collaboration for the IEEE RAISE pilot with a research team from NYU, Princeton and Cambridge fostering responsible use of AI in k-12 education.

An international speaker, guest lecturer, and educator on the intersection of technology, ethics, and human development, she holds Bachelor's degree in Education from State University of New York (SUNY) and Master's degree in Educational Psychology from Hunter College, certifications in AI Ethics, Regenerative Design, and Emergent Systems Change.

IEEE SA committees & positions: Wellbeing Metric for Autonomous A/IS Systems (P7010), Ethics Education Committee Co-Chair, Planet Positive 2030 Chair, Global Methodologies Committee, Emulated Empathy Standard Committee (P7014), Smart Cities Standard Committee (P7803), Global Artificial Intelligence Systems Flourishing Initiative, and upcoming standard on Cognitive Readiness (P7000 Series)

Email:

Address:United States

Mel of Future Human Lab Founder, Oxford University Collab Lab Convening Leader, Human-Centered Education and Human Flourishing, UNESCO AI Ethics Advisor, Harvard AI for Human Flourishing Global Council, and IEEE P7023 Chair

AI ethics has a gap that most engineers are unaware of. The dominant frameworks governing responsible AI, from IEEE's Ethically Aligned Design to the EU AI Act to corporate ethics guidelines, address the outputs of AI systems: their fairness, their transparency, their compliance. They ask what the system does yet we are just beginning to understand the full impacts, the critical complex risks of users’ interaction with AI systems across sectors, cultures and generations.

This webinar session introduces the concept of the Human Readiness Gap: the systemic lag between the pace of AI design, development and deployment and the preparation of the human beings who use, depend on, and are governed by AI systems. Drawing on cognitive science, clinical psychology, and social research, it presents evidence-backed research of AI's effects on human cognition, psychological safety, and social-relational impacts, effects that existing practices do not address.

Responsible AI use of AI systems is not primarily a technical or policy skill. It is an awareness and understanding of human preparation and readiness to interact with AI systems, not limited to, but especially generative AI systems. A technically sound system designed without these in mind and deployed to an unprepared human population has increased risk of producing unethical ethical outcomes to intended and unintended users. And engineers, as the designers of these systems, are positioned to help address it first.

The session examines the leading AI ethics frameworks and practices through a structural lens: what they measure, what they assume, and what is left out. The consistent finding that the interior experience of the human user, how AI reshapes judgment, erodes agency, or restructures relationships, falls outside the scope of every major framework currently in practice. This webinar makes the case that this omission is not peripheral. It is the central challenge of responsible AI deployment in the decade ahead and into the future.

Biography:

Mel Sellick is an applied psychologist and PhD researcher specializing in human-AI interaction. She is the creator of the Human Readiness Framework™ (HRF), developed through her work with organizations building digital personas and agentic AI, and she chairs IEEE P7023™, Standard for Assessing Organizational Readiness for Human-Artificial Intelligence (AI) Identity Resilience and Interaction Score. 

The HRF operationalizes three interdependent dimensions of human capacity in AI-mediated environments: psychological readiness, cognitive readiness, and relational readiness. As founder of Future Human Lab, Mel advises worldwide on responsible AI integration across industry, education, and policy sectors. 

Mel is also convening leader of Oxford University’s Collab Lab on Human-Centered Education and Human Flourishing, and she serves on Harvard's AI for Human Flourishing Global Council.

Her pioneering work on the human dimensions of human-AI interaction informed UNESCO's AI Readiness Assessment Methodology (RAM) 2.0 update, where she contributed to the revision and received glossary credit for defining "psychological readiness" as a new construct for the AI era, helping safeguard human agency in an AI-mediated world. 

Mel’s work proceeds from a clear premise: AI literacy is not Human Readiness. Knowing how a system works does not confer the capacities required to engage in safe and healthy ways. Within ethics conversations dominated by system-side accountability, she argues that the human system is the missing diagnostic in current AI governance, and that readiness is the condition under which technical and ethical safeguards can hold.

Address:United States