Sven Arend Ulpts (Aarhus University, Denmark)
Research guidelines and the scientific literature in general are full of ideas and recommendations of how proper science should look like. However, it remains an open question how the actual reality of research in the sciences relates to notions of proper or responsible science in, for instance, European research integrity guidelines? To answer this question, I conducted an ethnography of cognitive sciences in five cognitive science labs in Germany, the Netherlands and the UK. The aim is to understand how and under what conditions knowledge is produced and whether ideas of proper conduct that can be found in guidelines and the literature actually have a place in research reality. Hence, it is about capturing the perspectives of the researchers who are supposed to live in compliance with such guidelines and recommendations. To this end I further inquired what researchers think about how and whether current recommendations for the improvement of science fit into their everyday lives as researchers by conducting semi-structured interviews. Put shortly, I observed a complex mixture of alignment and mismatch between notions of good science and the research realities.
*recorded and presented on 13.11.2024
Thomas Wahl (Mälardalens Universitet, Sweden)
In the case of artificial intelligence, hyperbolic predictions of the emergence of intelligent machines, even ‘super intelligences’, consist of both dystopian fears of human suppression and extinction, and utopian hopes of human flourishing through freedom from labor and illness as well as unparalleled economic growth and prosperity. At the heart of the controversies between these two, we argue, are emergent and conflicting assumptions about what it means to be human, or rather, what defines humanness.
To address this topic, of how the understanding of humaness is constructed in relation to AI and how the (future) agency of AI and Humans are imagined, we turn to the genre of popular science and the imaginaries of the possibilities and effects of a future in which intelligent machines have bypassed many human capacities. Popular science as a genre is interesting in its ambition to translate inter-academic knowledge production about AI development while at the same time dramatizing it and making it relevant for business, politics, and the public.
First, the chapter deconstructs the imaginaries of a future shaped by super intelligent AIs and discusses how this imagined future builds on particular and narrow definitions of humanness – as essentially biological cognitive processors, but also as distinguishable as creative/non-creative and neuro-typical and neuro-diverse/passive and active. Secondly, we turn to the construction of AI as a “floating signifier” an object, a thing, that is devoid of meaning.
*recorded and presented on 16.10.2024
