The Illusion of Control
The amazing performance and rapid deployment of Generative AI like GPT-4 opens fascinating new research questions, ranging how the brain works to the impact it will have on language, identity and, more generally, on our societies. Exploiting our anthropomorphic tendencies, it has been built to make us believe that we communicate with a human. This raises the question of who is in control of technology with renewed urgency. In the 18th century Giambattista Vico claimed ‘verum ipsum factum’, we understand (only) what we make. I will explore what happens if we no longer understand the world that is ever more ‘made’ by us. Are we trapped in the illusion of control when comprehension is, at best, replaced by competence, but also as more power is concentrated in the hands of those who believe they have illimitable power?
Biography
Helga Nowotny is Professor emerita of Science and Technology Studies, ETH Zurich; founding member and former President of the European Research Council.
She has held teaching and research positions at universities and research institutions in several countries in Europe and continues to be actively engaged in research and innovation policy at European and international level. Among other, she is currently member of the Board of Trustees of the Falling Walls Foundation, Berlin; Vice-President of the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings; Senior Fellow at the School of Transnational Governance, EUI, Florence; member of the Council IEA de Paris; member of the Austrian Council for Research and Technology Development; Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Complexity Science Hub: Vienna and was Visiting Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She received multiple honorary doctorates including from the University of Oxford and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.
She has published widely in science and technology studies, STS, and on social time. Her latest publication “In AI we Trust. Power, Illusion and Control of Predictive Algorithms” has been published by Polity Press in 2021 and has been translated into Italian, Spanish, Chinese and German.
Website: http://helga-nowotny.eu/