Societal Dynamics of Artificial Intelligence

Social scientists refuse to see artificial intelligence merely as a set of handy tools, readily available to make our lives easier and more efficient. Instead, they highlight the power relations inherent in AI development and diffusion. And they explore the deeper societal transformations, including unintended and less visible ones, that follow.

In this double lecture, Roanne van Voorst and Daniel Mügge highlight the essential contribution the social sciences have to make to our understanding of real-world AI: they chart how AI regulates humans, and how humans, in turn, can and do regulate AI.

Algorithmic Ethics

In the first part of the double lecture, Roanne van Voorst hones in on rising concerns about ‘algorithmic ethics’. Research has long shown that datasets in AI (re)produce social biases, discriminate, and limit personal autonomy. Much of this literature, however, has merely focused on AI design and institutional frameworks, examining the subject through legal, technocratic, and philosophical perspectives. Whilst overlooking the socio-cultural context in which big data and AI systems are embedded, most particularly organizations in which human agents collaborate with AI. This is problematic, as frameworks for ‘ethical AI’ currently consider human oversight crucial. Assuming that humans will correct or resist AI when needed, while empirical evidence for this assumption is extremely thin. Very little is known about when and why people intervene or resist AI.

In this AISSR lecture, Roanne presents the first findings of an international research with professional caretakers who increasingly collaborate make decisions together with algorithms. She will discuss how they regulate, and are regulated by, AI. If AI does indeed have these transformative effects, what can or should be done about them?

The Politics of AI regulation

In the second part of this AISSR double lecture, Daniel Mügge explores the potential for and limits to human regulation of AI. These limits include corporate and international competition, which feeds an AI race with limited safeguards. At the same time, existing legal frameworks struggle to rein in technologies that evolve faster than legislators can keep up, and whose long-term effects are a matter of guesswork, not scientific certainty. An ambition to govern technologies democratically, by including diverse perspectives and experiences, only compounds these challenges. Canvassing the politics of AI regulation thus reveals in which ways societies can realistically shape their own AI futures.

About the speakers

Roanne van Voorst is a Futures-Anthropologist and the Principal Investigator of an ERC- funded research into human-nonhuman collaboration. She works at the anthropology department as an Assistant Professor and is the President of the Dutch Future Society.

Daniel Mügge is professor of political arithmetic at the political science department and principal investigator of the NWO-funded RegulAite project about EU AI regulation and geo-economics.