AI Working Group

Exploring how humanity will transform and persist in the age of AI.

2021 AI Working Group at Central European University

What Is the AI Working Group?

In 2010, the Arendt Center hosted a groundbreaking conference “Human Being in an Inhuman Age,” dedicated to thinking about how the rise of smart machines and artificial intelligence are transforming what it means to be human. Motivated by Hannah Arendt’s fundamental questioning of how the rise of science and automation threaten the human capacity for freedom, action, and politics, the conference asked how the humanist inquiry into the meaning of life is threatened once the very capacities that make us human can be done better by machines.

Digital Humanism Summit on AI and Democratic Sustainability

Chat-GPT’s startling abilities prompted 30 million humans to sign up for an account in just two months. It took Instagram a year to get to just 10 million users. The natural language processing model (based on GPT-3) that Open AI released to the public has already been superseded by a still more powerful system (based on GPT-4) that Microsoft is using to turbo-charge its products. An arms race is now on for Big Tech to push the limits of what AI can do. We will gather in Vienna to discuss the contours of this global challenge, and the possibilities for collective action to meet it.

Read more about the Summit here

Our purpose

To build a global network of digital humanism leaders for both collaborative research and teaching within the Open Society University Network, broadening existing relationships by joining forces with the Digital Humanism movement in Europe, while amplifying the voices of the global south in sharing best practices and evaluating the impact of generative AI and Big Tech on democratic sustainability.
Scope of the Workshop

A two-and-a-half-day forum comprised of five modules with presentations/panels within each:
(1) American and European Approaches to AI regulation
(2) Generative AI and Deep Fakes
(3) Content moderation and suppression of dissent as electoral interference (digital colonization)
(4) Scaling AI safety and governance
(5) Joint manifesto/policy statement for expanded future collaboration and advocacy.

Today, that question of how humanity will transform...

... and yet persist in the age of artificial intelligence is perhaps the great question of our world. A genuine Artificial Intelligence, capable of thought and reasoning, seems to be on the horizon. This raises questions at the center of humanities and politics: Will humans still be economically necessary? Will art remain a human capacity? What is the fate of democracy and self-rule in an age of artificially intelligent machines that can predict and control human behavior? Above all, what is the fate of humanity when man increasingly acts like and is controlled by artificial intelligence.