Artificial intelligence

    Publisher: Social Europe (in cooperation with Friedrich-Ebert Stiftung and Weizenbaum Institut)
    Published: 1st August 2020

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https://www.socialeurope.eu/book/artificial-intelligence


Artificial Intelligence is permeating a wide range of areas and it is bound to transform work and society. This dossier, published in cooperation with our partner Friedrich Ebert Stiftung and Weizenbaum Institute, addresses possibilities and challenges of AI. Above all, it asks what needs to be done politically in order to shape this transformation for the sake of the common good.

AI has conjured up a dystopia of robots displacing human workers from employment. Some have predicted very large-scale job substitution but others question whether such a predetermined outcome can be envisaged: whether jobs are lost and how they are changed depends on whether workers are involved in the decisions that are made. Similar concerns apply to issues of recruitment and monitoring of workers: will AI data serve a ‘surveillance capitalism’ or could it assist workers in the performance of their jobs if they have more power to influence the outcome?

AI raises wider questions about the society in which we live and that of the future. Market-research institutes foresee huge efficiency gains, but are these credible and, if so, how will such gains be distributed? Feminists and anti-racists have expressed concern that the algorithms on which AI depends unconsciously embed the social prejudices of their human authors. Issues of privacy and civil liberty surround the possession and control of the data mined by AI. How education must change so that citizens can feel empowered rather than alienated by AI is also at stake—as is the ever-present issue of where AI fits in meeting the existential challenge of climate change and biodiversity loss.

With contributions by Judith Clifton, Amy Glasmeier, Mia Gray, Lars Klingbeil, Daniela Kolbe, Markus Hoppe, Nadine Müller, Mark Graham, Mohammad Amir Anwar, Phoebe Moore, Florian Butollo, Christian Kellermann, Mareike Winkler, Miapetra Kumpula-Natri, Martin Schüßler, Selin Sayek Böke, Reinhard Messerschmidt, Stefan Ullrich and Elena Esposito.