Disruptive technologies, disrupted politics? Engaging Artificial Intelligence across disciplines
“Aristotle University of Thessaloniki-King’s College series of joint seminars on Artificial Intelligence and its implications
Call for Papers
A seminar series between King’s College London and Aristotle University of Thessaloniki to explore different responses to what have been termed disruptive technologies. Most recently, the rise of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) has intensified public anxieties around algorithmic governance, machine learning and big data by reconfiguring social and cultural relations. AI now does not only find patterns among masses of data, but it can generate text and images. At the same time, concerns about AI and its uses across social and political fields – from warfare and border controls to health governance and identification practices – have not unabated. Questions of the ethical and legal implications of recent developments in AI have been supplemented by concerns about political and social effects. Our interactions with each other, state actors, private and public institutions are mediated through AI in ways that often remain opaque and unaccountable.
This seminar series proposes to understand disruption through four interrelated dimensions: ethical, legal, political and social. As AI is understood to be disruptive, we ask what and how it disrupts. The aim of the seminars is to address challenges of AI and modes of analysis from across two geographical locations and from different interdisciplinary perspectives. The seminars will be held online and will feature interventions by scholars from each university.
Seminar 1 September 2023
AI Ethics: still relevant?
As big tech companies have started to fire their ethics teams and scholars have argued that ethical commitments have only been ‘ethics-washing’, this seminar revisits questions about AI ethics. Can AI ethics still be relevant? What would its relevance entail? What mechanisms -if any- and governed by whom are capable of ethical regulation of AI and could be trusted to do so? Are public institutions capable of doing so? Is it ethical to design or allow a post- human world?
Seminar 2 October 2023
Legal interventions: between regulation and litigation
Our second seminar will focus on legal interventions and strategies. What is the relation between regulation and litigation? What are the fundamental principles, capable of surviving within a period of legal uncertainty because of AI? Is it possible for AI entities to acquire a legal personality and if so under what conditions? Should access to AI be social right? What is the relationship between state sovereignty and AI? What is the role of criminal, civil and intellectual property norms under the influence of AI?
Seminar 3 November 2023
Politics of disruption: what is disrupted by disruptive technologies?
The third seminar addresses political questions of disruption. It situates these in the contexts of debates about global orders, power and institutions. Is it possible for our public institutions of the Newtonian world to survive the impact of AI? What is the role of democratic institutions in relation to AI?
Seminar 4 December 2023
AI remaking the social?
The final seminar will discuss the implications of AI for social relations and sociality. As AI technologies are increasingly used across education, welfare, health, they reshape relations between individuals and institutions. AI as a factor of social inequality or of egalitarian societies? The role of AI in social and personal relations.
Please send abstracts of up to 300 words until 31 July 2023 to any of the following emails, under the title “AI seminars”, together with a short bio (up to 200 words):
claudia.aradau@kcl.ac.uk; thtzimas@polsci.auth.gr; gzarotia@econ.auth.gr