The Humanities and the Rise of AI - Luxembourg, 14-18 June 2020
---------------

The Humanities and the Rise of AI
Implications of Cultural and Societal Engineering

Organized by the Faculty of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences
in cooperation with the Department of Computer Science (University of Luxembourg)

We invite paper presentations of 20 minutes in one of our 4 sections (see below):

Submission deadline for abstracts (up to 2 pages)
January 31, 2020 - please send to: cfp@endsofthehumanities.com

Travel grants for early career researchers are available. For further information, please visit http://endsofthehumanities.com/wp/travel-grants/

Digitization and the rise of artificial intelligence forecast radical change on all aspects of human practice, especially given the ever-improving abilities of algorithms in tasks like pattern recognition and their practical application. Powerful technology arises from AI research, opening the gate for various forms of cultural and societal engineering, i.e., a reshaping of culture and society by dint of algorithmic models and ‘intelligent’ applications.

Although the development of artificial intelligence is still in its beginnings, it has already triggered an enormous rush of utopian and dystopian thinking. While some dream of immortality and the vanquishing of poverty, disease, and warfare, others foresee a grim future for those parts of humanity that will find themselves outpaced by technology. Potential consequences of the changes imposed by technological advancement on human practice reach from the level of the individual, through cultural techniques, to the organization of society as a whole, raising fundamental questions which we will address in the four sections of the conference resp. special events.

Special events are planned by the AI-team around the topics "Social robotics" and "A technological roadmap for AI after 2050".
We consider a special issue of a high-ranked journal for extended versions of high-quality computer-science-oriented contributions.
More information will be provided in the coming months.

Invited speakers include, among others:
--------------------------------------
- Armin Grunwald
(Head of Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis, KIT, Karlsruhe )
- Koen V. Hindriks
(Prof. Artificial intelligence, VU Amsterdam, focusing on Social Robotics, Co-Founder "Interactive Robotics")
- Lyse Langlois
(Scientific director of the International Observatory of the Societal Impact of AI and Digitization, Université Laval)
Luís Moniz Pereira
(Prof. emeritus of Computer Science at the New university of Lisbon, author of several books on Machine Ethics)
- Giuseppe Longo
(Prof. emeritus, Centre Cavaillès, CNRS, Collège de France & Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris)
- Jan Broersen
(Professor of logical methods in AI, University of Utrecht, ERC on Responsible Intelligent Systems 2013-18)
- Raja Chatila
(Sorbonne, Paris, Professor and director of the Institute of Intelligent Systems and Robotics)
- Marija Slavkovik
(Associate Professor, University of Bergen, Norway, Advisory group on Ethical, Legal, Social Issues of CLAIRE)

Conference sections:
--------------------
• Section I – Mind and Consciousness: How does artificial intelligence impact our understanding of the human mind, especially in relation to the role of its computational equivalents that reach more and more aspects of everyday life (e.g., chatbots, driverless mobility, risk assessment software in the banking and insurance sector)?
• Section II – Learning and Inventing What are the consequences of digitization and machine learning algorithms for education and our understanding of learning and creativity (e.g., in schooling through adaptive tutors, but also against the background of our current notion of creativity as a unique human ability)?
• Section III – Reading and Data Modeling How will the increasing use of computational methodology change the ways we relate to the past and envision the future (e.g., by reading), both in academia and in society? How can the enrichment of algorithmic models with methods and results from the humanities shape and improve computational assessment of human practice (e.g., data mining of big text corpora, automated translation, racial bias in neural networks)?
• Section IV – Complexity and Control: How does the use of artificial intelligence in all domains of human practice influence how we deal with complexity (e.g., of society) and human control thereof? Can computational methods help to reduce, organize, and analyze cultural complexity, or do they pose a threat to human control over different aspects of the lifeworld (e.g., security and network technology, automation of industrial production, autonomous weaponry)?

Against the background of such questions, the conference aims to foster an open and critical reflection on the consequences of cultural and societal engineering. The conference investigates not only opportunities and shortcomings of AI research, but also implications and potential structural effects of technological innovation for the organization of societal practice (e.g., work) and techniques of cultural self-reflection (e.g., history). It will not only ask what technologies can do (or will be able to do in the future), but also how these capabilities can be compared and related to their human equivalents, e.g., perception, cognition, and communication.

The original general CfP can be found at http://endsofthehumanities.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/CfP-Humanities-and-the-Rise-of-AI.pdf