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What Is the AI Working Group?
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.

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

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.

The idea of this working group is to gather thinkers...
Christof Royer, CEU
 

The idea of this working group is to gather thinkers...

... experienced in the humanities and artificial intelligence to reflect on each other’s work and conceive common projects that bring the humanities to bear on the rising importance of data and machine learning. The working group consists of six core OSUN members who apply to participate, along with invited visitors. It allows OSUN scholars to gain expertise in and give them time to write about one of the central questions of our time. Eventually, these OSUN scholars will collaborate in teaching a new Network Course on Artificial Intelligence and the Humanities.  The group, led by Tim Crane (CEU) meets once per year in Europe and the US for two-day intensive workshops, including presentations by experts and extended discussions.
Questions explored at the 2021 AI Working Group in Vienna, Austria included:
— Can AI ever create genuine thinking machines that have ‘general intelligence’?
— Could an AI ever be conscious? If not, why not?
— What will happen to human employment in an age of intelligent machines?
— What are the ethical and political implications of AI? How do the developments affect human responsibility for action, and political principles like democracy and self-rule?
— How does the development of AI affect creativity and the arts?

Who is in the Working Group?

The group consists of 8 scholars from across the OSUN network who met in Vienna, Austria June 22-25, 2021 at CEU. The AI Group also joined the OSUN Yehuda Elkana Workshops at CEU for lectures and seminars presented by the inaugural fellowship winner, Helga Nowotny.

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  • Tim Crane
    Tim Crane leads the Working Group. He is a philosopher at CEU, and the author of the best-selling introduction to the philosophy of AI, The Mechanical Mind (first published in 1995, now in its third edition).
     
  • Alex Grzankowski 
    Alex Grzankowski Is a Senior Lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London working primarily in Mind, Language, Metaphysics, and Epistemology. Prior to London, he was an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Texas Tech University and a Lecturer at the University of Cambridge while working on the New Directions in the Study of Mind project. 
     
  • Allison Stanger
    Allison Stanger is a Senior Advisor to the Hannah Arendt Humanities Network. She is Russell Leng ’60 Professor of International Politics and Economics at Middlebury College; Research Affiliate (Co-lead, Theory of AI Practice Initiative) at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University; and External Professor and Science Board member at the Santa Fe Institute. She is working on a new book tentatively titled Who Elected Big Tech? 
  • Renata Salecl 
    Renata Salecl is a professor of Psychology/Psychoanalyis and Law in the School of Law at Birkbeck, University of London, and a senior researcher in criminology at the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana, Slovenia. She is a leading scholar on the subject of psychoanalysis and law, and she has a long association with the critical legal studies movement.
  • Christof Royer
    Christof Royer olds a PhD from the University of St Andrews (UK), and is an international political theorist whose research straddles the disciplines of International Relations, Political Theory and International Law. His research is, thus, interdisciplinary in nature, and he seeks to address complex questions surrounding mass atrocities, global justice, globalisation, human rights, political violence, contemporary practices of surveillance and democratic struggles and contestations.
  • Lauraleen Ford
    With a background in both sociology and law, Professor Laura Ford’s research and teaching areas include law, religion and society, economic sociology, social theory, the history and development of intellectual property, and historical sociology. Ford’s recently published book—The Intellectual Property of Nations: Sociological and Historical Perspectives on a Modern Legal Institution, offers a macrohistorical account of the emergence of intellectual property as a new type of legal property. 
  • Md. Saimum Reza Talukder
    Mr. Md. Saimum Reza Talukder is currently serving as the Senior Lecturer, School of Law, BRAC University, Bangladesh. He is an enrolled lawyer at the Bangladesh Bar Council and a member of the Dhaka District Bar Association. Mr. Saimum has completed LL.M. and LL.B. from the University of Chittagong, Bangladesh and holds a specialized Master’s degree in Law and Digital Technologies from Leiden University, Netherlands. He holds a Postgraduate Diploma in Social Innovation in a Digital Context (SIDC) from Lund University, Sweden and  a Diploma in “Economic, Social and Development Rights” from the Kathmandu School of Law.
  • Leanne Ussher 
    Leanne Ussher studies and writes on monetary theory, local currencies, cryptocurrencies, and blockchain ecosystems.  She is a Research Fellow at Copenhagen Business School, Research Fellow at Wolfram Blockchain Labs, Center for Civic Engagement Fellow at Bard College, and Associate Editor at Frontiers in Blockchain for Good.  Leanne has taught economics, and finance at Bard College, University of Massachusetts Boston, and City University of New York. Prior to academia she was a Securities Analyst at the Reserve Bank of Australia. Leanne holds a PhD in Economics from the New School for Social Research. https://www.linkedin.com/in/leanne-ussher-9535856/
  • Aaron Lambert 
    Aaron Lambert is Director of The Socrates Project at Central European University. 
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