Mark Coeckelbergh WASP-HS guest professor in Uppsala
2023-01-27
For the period of May 2023 – April 2028, Uppsala University has the great privilege of welcoming Mark Coeckelbergh as WASP-HS guest professor. In this capacity, professor Coeckelbergh will lead the research project AI Design Futures. He will be hosted by the Departments of Informatics and Media and Business Studies, bridging disciplines and creating a new research environment across the Departments spanning Law and Business, Existential Media Studies and Human-Computer Interaction.
Mark Coeckelbergh is Professor of Philosophy of Media and Technology at the Philosophy Department of the University of Vienna. Previously he was Vice Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy of Education, President of the Society for Philosophy and Technology, and Managing Director of the 3TU Centre for Ethics and Technology. Mark is also member of various entities that support policy building in the area of robotics and artificial intelligence, including the European Commission’s High Level Expert Group on AI. He is the author of 17 philosophy books and numerous articles.
The AI Design Futures Project will explore AI as impacting humans at the existential level, by influencing how we experience and think about time, vulnerability and finitude, and how we make sense of the world. It will also interrogate how AI raises normative questions about the social and political futures we imagine and how we should design the societal institutions and socio-technical systems in which AI systems are embedded. These simultaneous and multi-layered processes of design are inextricably intertwined. This research project will address these issues by studying and discussing how algorithms shape our temporal imagination existentially and politically, and how our images of the future feed back into the design of AI and the institutions in which AI is embedded. The project seeks to conceptualise and bring about existential, political and institutional design futures, by means of engaging both political and existential philosophy, so as to imagine and create new narratives for alternative AI Design Futures.
The AI Design Futures Project, funded by The Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program – Humanities and Society (WASP-HS), led by professor Mark Coeckelbergh, also include Magnus Strand at the Department of Business Studies, professor Amanda Lagerkvist and Matilda Tudor at the Department of Informatics and Media.
The project kicks off with the open lecture “The future of AI – ethical and political challenges” by Professor Mark Coeckelbergh, 2 May 2023.