THE FUTURE OF AI: SOCIAL AND CULTURAL ASPECTS
Online lecture series

Bruno Gransche (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)
The Future of AI and its Present Presence – Understanding Conceptual Transference and its Orientation Problems

The Future of AI depends on how it is built, trained, regulated, used, and embedded in our lifeworld and how it is allowed to affect our decisions and actions today. In other words: AI futures are conditioned by their present presence. This praesentia is problematic: A large part of the present phenomenon and of the effect of AI is its future in the form of expectations, announcements, promises, etc. AI is to a significant extent present in the modes of as-if and not-yet-but-imminent. However, the actual presence of AI, its distribution, implementation, and how AI systems already structure our everyday life is stunningly not-present in terms of our awareness. This ambiguous presence of AI phenomenon roots in its problematic conceptual presence: systems with AI functionalities are not commonly known and understood; not technically and not in their lifeworld implications.

What the phenomenon of AI is and to whom and when (i.e. diverse AI presences) depends on the respective understanding of it and this sense-making is largely metaphorical (drawing on Nietzsche, Blumenberg, Lakoff). We try to understand the new AI phenomenon via the transference of established concepts. Understanding orients actions, and metaphors orient understanding, but the conceptual transference of metaphors needs orientation again, they need an intelligent selection of meaningfully transferable and non-transferable aspects.

If this orientation is impeded, then inadequate meaning parts bleed into the transference target and alter its understanding, which orients different and possibly inadequate actions. This can be shown with the example of intelligence itself (Latin: inter-legere means to choose between and pick up manually). That the conceptual transference of ‘intelligence’ to IT systems is suitable to orient adequate actions in dealing with AI is highly questionable. However much (in)adequate or (un)suitable, the dominant usages determine the present presence and thus the future of AI.

Bruno Gransche has been a philosopher at the Institute of Technology Futures ITZ at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology KIT (Germany) since 2020. He works as a scholar/Principal Investigator (PI) in the fields of philosophy of technology and ethics, socio-technical cultural techniques, and anticipatory thinking focusing among others on artificial assistants, machine learning, shared autonomy, and digital colonization of the lifeworld. He is a research fellow at the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research ISI in Karlsruhe (Germany), where he worked as a philosopher and Foresight expert between 2009- 2016.