Helga Nowotny

Helga Nowotny is Professor emerita of Science and Technology Studies, ETH Zurich and Founding Member and Former President of the European Research Council. After a distinguished career at universities and research institutions in several European countries she continues to be actively engaged in research and innovation policy at national, European and international level, among them as Member of the Board of Trustees, 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 Sciences, Technology, and Innovation; Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Complexity Science Hub, Vienna.

She has received many awards and honorary doctorates including from the University of Oxford and the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. She has published widely in Science and Technology Studies, STS, and on social time. Her latest book publications include The Cunning of Uncertainty (2016) and In AI We Trust (2021) which has since been translated into Italian, Spanish, Chinese and German. Currently Helga Nowotny is also working on the Socioscope project that develops a pioneering methodology to study societal transitions in the domain of food production, transportation and consumption. It is a new way of doing social science research by collecting high quality “thick” data with standardized multi-methods across continents, something that has rarely been applied when studying social phenomena.

The project

Title: AI and the illusion of control

"The amazing feats of LLMs, Large Language Models, to generate texts and images that have been trained with data from the web as well as synthetically produced, have surprised even experts. New opportunities were celebrated, and many concerns raised, ranging from threats to undermine liberal democracies through targeted ‘disinformation’ to how to cope with job losses for professionals and artists and the upheaval the diffusion of Generative AI will cause in the health care and education system. One concern, however, looms even larger: are humans still in control of AI technologies?  This is not about the ‘existential risk’ of an Artificial General Intelligence wiping out human agency and creativity sometimes in the future which is conjured only to divert us from attending to problems in the present. Rather, questions abound like whether we ‘over-delegate’ when increasingly installing command and control systems in autonomous weaponry and what will happen when AI systems that are designed and advertised to project the illusion of intelligence become pervasive in the daily lives of citizens, business, and public administration. Given the enormous concentration of economic power in a handful of large international corporations and the difficulties that governments experience in regulating AI, is control handed over to Big Tech?"

Hosting institution: Institut d'Études Avancées Paris (IEA)

Selective Bibliography

• Nowotny, Helga, “The Re-Enchanted Universe of AI: the Place for Human Agency”, to be published in: Introduction to Digital Humanism, Editors: H. Werthner, C. Ghezzi, J. Kramer, J. Nida-Rümelin, B. Nuseibeh, E. Prem, A. Stanger, 2023, Springer Nature.
• Nowotny, Helga, “Digital Humanism – Navigating the Tensions Ahead” in H. Werthner, E. Prem, E. A. Lee, and C. Ghezzi (eds): Perspectives on Digital Humanism, Springer, 2022. (BibTeX).
• Nowotny, Helga, “In AI We Trust. Power. Illusion and Control of Predictive Algorithms”, Polity Press; 2021 “Le macchine di Dio. Gli algoritmi predittivi e l'illusione del controllo”, LUISS University Press, 2022 ; “La fe en la inteligencia artificial. Los algoritmos predictivos y el futuro de la humanidad”, Galaxia Gutenberg, 2022, 未來的錯覺, the Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2023; “Die KI sei mit euch. Macht, Illusion und Kontrolle algorithmischer Vorhersage”, Matthes & Seitz, Berlin, 2023.
• Nowotny, Helga, “The Illusion of Control: Living with digital Others” to be published in: “The Illusion of Control: Living with the digital Others”, in Global Perspectives, special issue “illusion of Control” forthcoming 2024, (S.E. van der Leeuw, V. Galaz, J.-W. Vasbinder,