IN AI WE TRUST

Scientific discussion from the "Franz Vranitzky Library"

BARBARA PRAINSACK IN CONVERSATION WITH HELGA NOWOTNY

IN AI WE TRUST
Power, illusion and control of predictive algorithms

Will the future be dominated by predictive artificial intelligence algorithms? If so, what will this mean for our behaviour, for our institutions and for being human? AI is changing our experience of time and the future and challenging our identities. While we are dazzled by its efficiency, we still have little understanding of how it affects us. We are faced with a paradox. We use AI to increase our control over the future and uncertainty, while at the same time the power of AI reduces our ability to act. This happens when we forget that we humans created the digital technologies to which we attribute agency. The developments also call into question the narrative of progress that played such a central role in modernity and is based on the hubris of total control. However, the threat of surveillance also offers people the opportunity to reappropriate this control and transform it into care. Helga Nowotny explores these questions in the book In AI we trust, published in October 2021. Helga Nowotny talks to Barbara Prainsack at the Kreisky Forum about the insights it contains.

Prof Dr Helga Nowotny is professor emerita at ETH Zurich and former president of the European Research Council, ERC. She is a member of the Council for Research and Technology Development, Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Complexity Science Hub Vienna and a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Kreisky Forum. In addition to other activities in scientific committees, she is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Falling Falls Foundation in Berlin and Vice-President of the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings. She has received numerous awards, including an honorary doctorate from Oxford University and the Weizman Institute of Science in Israel.

Prof Dr Barbara Prainsack is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Kreisky Forum. She is Professor of Comparative Policy Analysis at the University of Vienna, where she also heads the Department of Political Science and the interdisciplinary research platform “Governance of Digital Practices”. She is a member of the Austrian Bioethics Commission and a member of the European Group on Ethics (EGE), which advises the European Commission (2017-2021).

Helga Nowotny
In AI We Trust: Power, Illusion and Control of Predictive Algorithms
Polity Press, 2021; ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4881-1