How Can Artificial Intelligence Take Over Power?

• Posted On: May 28, 2015
• Posted By: tilen

You are invited to the discussion “Brave New Digital World? Artificial Intelligence, Internetization, and the New Social Order”, which will take place on Tuesday, June 2, 2015, at 11:00 AM in the main hall of SAZU . As part of the discussion, you will be able to attend a lecture by academician Ivan Bratko titled “How Can Artificial Intelligence Take Over Power?” and a lecture by academician Slavko Splichal , who will speak about the pitfalls of internetization.

Ivan Bratko: How Can Artificial Intelligence Take Over Power?

Since the emergence of the field of artificial intelligence, technical developments have been accompanied by questions from non-technical circles: is it not dangerous that artificial intelligence could take over power from humans? People often imagine robots conspiring against humans and taking control through military force. However, such a scenario does not appear likely to materialize. In recent years, due to new technological possibilities of the internet and artificial intelligence, this question has suddenly become real and unsettling. This risk is also indirectly highlighted in an open letter by some leading artificial intelligence experts from early 2015. This lecture will present a likely scenario that the open letter does not explicitly mention. This scenario would lead, in a “soft” way, to the end of democracy and a de facto takeover of power by computers.

Slavko Splichal: Internetization and the Redistribution of Social Power

With its ubiquity, the internet is more than just a new information and communication technology, as its development embodies, reproduces, and sustains forms of social organization that permeate the entire (global) social structure. Internetization, as the most radical form of the mediatization of social processes and everyday life to date, increases the permeability of boundaries and thus changes the relationships between private and public, between work and leisure, between production and consumption, between (political) participation and entertainment, between the state and civil society, between “progressive” and “stagnant” economic sectors, and between national and transnational. In the contradictory processes of globalization and fragmentation driven by the internet, the key question becomes the socio-economic and political consequences of these changing relationships for individuals and society. Since the early warnings of the Club of Rome in Microelectronics and Society (1982), it has been clear that internetization does not bring only unquestionably beneficial social consequences, but also leads to greater inequality, enforced publicity, dependency, surveillance, and raises questions about the (il)legitimacy and (in)effectiveness of the redistribution of social power and new forms of (transnational) governance.