Upcoming Seminar Series: Disruptive technologies, disrupted politics?

ABOUT THE SERIES:

'Disruptive technologies, disrupted politics? Engaging Artificial Intelligence across disciplines' is an upcoming series of joint seminars on Artificial Intelligence and its implications. The series is organised by 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 different geographical locations and from interdisciplinary perspectives.

The series will take place over multiple days in the upcoming months and all sessions will be held online. Register on the event page.

SEMINAR SERIES PROGRAMME:

Seminar 1 AI Ethics: still relevant?

18 October 2023; 12.30-14.00

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 AI regulation and could be trusted to do so? Are public institutions capable of doing so? Is it ethical to design for a post-human world?

Elke Schwarz, Homo technologicus and the challenge of moral agency, Queen Mary’s University of London

Claudia Aradau, Ethics and the ‘limit case’ of AI, King’s College London

Chair: Themis Tzimas, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

Seminar 2 Legal interventions: between regulation and litigation

15 November 2023; 12.30-14.00

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 a 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?

Athanasia Dogouli, The implications of Artificial Intelligence for the European Patent Law , Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

Vasiliki Papadouli, The Private Rules of Law ‘under the Influence’ of Artificial Intelligence: Can they ‘Adapt’ to the New Reality?, Vrije Universiteit Brussels

Maria Varaki, AI and the “necessity” of a right to human judgment?, King’s College London

Chair: Claudia Aradau, King’s College London

Seminar 3 (Politics of disruption: what is disrupted by disruptive technologies?) and Seminar 4 (AI remaking the social?) will take place in January and February 2024.

A PDF of the programme is available for download below:

Disruptive technologies, disrupted politics_ Engaging Artificial Intelligence across dis.

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