[Air-L] Conference Programm and Registration: Shifting AI Controversies, Berlin, 29-30 JAN, 2024

[Christian Katzenbach]

Dear colleagues, 

we are happy and proud to announce that the conference programme for our international conference „Shifting AI Controversies“ is now live, and registration is open and free: 
https://www.hiig.de/en/events/conference-shifting-ai-controversies/

The conference happens on-site in Berlin, 29-30 January, 2024, at the wonderful vicinities of Museum für Kommunikation, and of the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB). 

The conference includes keynote and closing panels, a public evening event on "Not my Existential Risk! The politics of controversy in an age of AI“, and ten academic panels with fifty international speakers. Confirmed speakers include Louise Amoore, Sally Wyatt, Christian Pentzold, Alison Powell, Matthias Spielkamp, Mark Scott, Marek Tuszynski,  Jeanette Hofmann, Minna Ruckenstein, Caja Thimm, Daniel Mügge, and many more. 

The conference is co-hosted by the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG) and the ZeMKI, University of Bremen, in cooperation with the research group “Politics of Digitalization” at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB). It is the concluding of the international research project „Shaping 21st Century AI – Controversies and Closure in Media, Policy, and Research“ with partners at SciencesPo (FRA), University of Warwick (UK), and Concordia University (UK). 

Please see below and online for more information and registration. 

With best regards, 
Christian Katzenbach 

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Conference 
Shifting AI Controversies – Prompts, Provocations & Problematisations for Society-Centered AI
29 & 30 January 2024 | Berlin Social Science Center (WZB), Germany

https://www.hiig.de/en/events/conference-shifting-ai-controversies/

Controversies about AI abound, especially since ChatGPT took over the Internet by storm, becoming the most popular applications in the Web’s history within only a few months. The current excitement about the perils and prospects of general purpose AI applications like ChatGPT is only the most recent wave of public interest in the long history of “artificial intelligence” (AI). With its metaphysical imaginaries of human-machine symbiosis, anthropomorphic robots and machine thinking, arguably oversized scientific claims and technological developments in this field have always raised concerns. What the current debate makes much more visible than previous attention cycles, though, is that contemporary AI companies and scientists dominate not only the discourse promoting AI’s prospects but also that on AI’s perils. From engineers at OpenAI to research pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, technologists and industry-based scientists increasingly articulate warnings that AI might cause serious and fundamental damage to societies. With this move, the already dominant players are now also occupying the space of public critique, yielding the risk that activism, social science, critical journalism and the arts are pushed even further  to the margins of public and expert debates. Are we currently having the public controversies on AI that we should have, or is AI panic derailing us from actual and relevant concerns? How do we get to the controversies that we need and to the exploration and articulation of society-centered AI?

The conference will hold keynotes, panels and interventions from scholars, civil society and practitioners on the topic of AI controversies.

Conference Programme (pdf): https://www.hiig.de/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Shifting-AI-Controversies-Conference-Programme.pdf