In AI We Trust: With Professor Helga Nowotny

ERC Scientific Seminar - In AI We Trust: With Professor Helga Nowotny
Monday, 13 December 2021, 11:00-12:30

One of the most persistent concerns about the future is whether it will be dominated by the predictive algorithms of AI – and, if so, what this will mean for social behaviour, for our institutions and what it means to be human. At the heart of our trust in AI lies a paradox: we leverage AI to increase our control over the future and uncertainty, while at the same time the performativity of AI, the power it has to make us act in the ways it predicts, reduces our agency over the future. Science and technology have enabled us to embark on an open-ended co-evolutionary path with the machines created by us – we are well-advised to have wisdom on our side.

Helga Nowotny is Professor emerita of Science and Technology Studies, ETH Zurich and former President of the European Research Council. She has held teaching and research positions at several universities and research institutions in Europe and continues to be actively engaged in research and innovation policy at European and international level. Among other, she is currently member of the Board of Trustees of the Falling Walls Foundation, Berlin, Vice-President of the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings, a member of the Austrian Council for Research and Technology Development and Visiting Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She received multiple honorary doctorates including from the University of Oxford and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.
She has published widely in science and technology studies, STS, and on social time. Her latest publication In AI we trust. Power, Illusion and Control of Predictive Algorithms has been published in September 2021. Other publications are The Cunning of Uncertainty (2015) and An Orderly Mess (2017).