From AI mythology to responsible design: Shifting the debate, empowering people

Description

Artificial intelligence and robotics are arguably the buzzwords of the moment. Indeed, smart technologies have come a long way and—besides significant risks—they entail many opportunities for humanity: From finding new cures for diseases to enabling greater autonomy for the elderly, from optimizing energy consumption to granting us more free time and space for creativity. All of that requires productive thinking about how we want to live in the future, how we want to utilize robotics and AI for our goals, and how we can shape these powerful tools to be ethical, sustainable, trustworthy and beneficial to as many people as possible. The current AI hype, however, comes along with public myths and misconceptions that are counterproductive to fruitful discourse, because they distract us from real-world potentials and real-world limitations of smart technologies. Stereotypical media images of highly humanlike robots make people afraid of the wrong things. They fuel our diffuse fears of being dominated or made redundant by “intentional” machines while we should actually discuss the reproduction of discriminatory bias by self-learning systems trained on man-made data. Sensationalist AI news and industrial attempts to raise investor awareness inflate expectations of the technical status quo while some start-ups, paradoxically, still engage real humans to quietly carry out bots’ tasks. At the same time, many people outside of the tech circle lack a basic understanding of how current AI methods work. They not only have to rely on publicly spread technology myths in their opinion forming, they neither have a chance to realize that entry barriers to smart technologies are in fact lower than usually expected. For making real progress in human-centered technology design, we need an informed public discourse that turns away from science fiction and empowers more people to take part in it.

Period	24 Aug 2018
Event title	Europäisches Forum Alpbach 2018: Technologiegespräche
Event type	Conference
Location	AustriaShow on map