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.

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.

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?

The working group is led by...

... Tim Crane, 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). The 2021 Working Group consists of 6 scholars from across the OSUN network and 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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