Editorial
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No. 48 — 2020
AI scientific Policies in China
Artificial intelligence (AI) has evolved into a new era, and its rapid development will profoundly affect the everyday life of citizens worldwide. Countries around the world are establishing governmental strategies and initiatives to guide the development of AI. The Chinese government is using the development of AI as a major strategy to enhance national competitiveness and protect national security. In January 2016, the Chinese State Council released the 13th Five-year Plan on National Science and Technology Innovation, explicitly putting forward the guidance, general requirements, strategic mission and reform measures for Chinese science and technology innovation. Over the next five years,…
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No. 48 — 2020
Artificial Intelligence in Cities
At a worldwide level, there is growing awareness around AI. The United States and Canada have been leading in the AI field for a long time whilst China has developed a mega initiative to take the lead . Recently, things are starting to move in Europe. A number of European countries do recognize the importance of AI, and are catching up and developing AI-strategies. The European Commission announced a plan to invest 1,500 Millions of euros up to 2020 to promote AI research and exceed the 20,000 million euros invested in the next 10 years. Notwithstanding the capacity AI has…
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No. 48 — 2020
A Summary of AI Political Strategy in the USA
Compared to other countries, the USA has been relatively slow to develop a national strategy pertaining specifically to Artificial Intelligence. However that has not slowed down the rate of progress in American academia and industry that has led to many noteworthy AI technical advances over the past several years, both in fundamental algorithms and in practical applications. This high rate of AI-related technological progress shows no sign of slowing down. Meanwhile, the federal government has recently become more proactive in its organization of a national strategy and providing guidance and possibly new resources for AI development. * Artificial Intelligence (AI)…
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No. 48 — 2020
The artificial intelligence economy
Artificial intelligence as a new technological platform In economics we generally use the term artificial intelligence (AI) to describe the process of creating and developing non-human intelligent technological agents. AI can be seen as a traditional technological innovation process in the sense that science and technology are applied to create machines, software and algorithms that act on economic activities, especially production, by either complementing or substituting them. However AI is also a radical, disruptive technological innovation process because these technological agents act intelligently, as they are capable of recognising and responding to their environment. Comparison with human intelligence can be…
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No. 48 — 2020
Thinking About ‘Ethics’ in the Ethics of AI
A major international consultancy firm identified ‘AI ethicist’ as an essential position for companies to successfully implement artificial intelligence (AI) at the start of 2019. It declares that AI ethicists are needed to help companies navigate the ethical and social issues raised by the use of AI. The view that AI is beneficial but nonetheless potentially harmful to individuals and society is widely shared by the industry, academia, governments, and civil society organizations. Accordingly and in order to realize its benefits while avoiding ethical pitfalls and harmful consequences, numerous initiatives have been established to a) examine the ethical, social, legal…
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No. 48 — 2020
Killer robots
The world faces a very critical choice about the future of warfare. This is not due to the growing political movement against fully autonomous weapons. 28 nations have called on the UN to ban such weapons pre-emptively. Most recently, the European Parliament voted in support of such a ban, whilst the German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas called for international cooperation on regulating autonomous weapons. And in the same week that Maas called for action, Japan gave its backing to international efforts to regulate the development of lethal autonomous weapons at the United Nations. At the end of 2018, the UN…
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No. 48 — 2020
AI: Interrogating questions
It can no longer be denied that Artificial Intelligence is having a growing impact in many areas of human activity. It is helping humans communicate with each other—even beyond linguistic boundaries—, finding relevant information in the vast information resources available on the web, solving challenging problems that go beyond the competence of a single expert, enabling the deployment of autonomous systems, such as self-driving cars or other devices that handle complex interactions with the real world with little or no human intervention, and many other useful things. These applications are perhaps not like the fully autonomous, conscious and intelligent robots…
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No. 48 — 2020
Illiberal algorithms
The close of the first decade of the 21st century marked the final end of the dream of deregulated global capitalism as a historical horizon of peace and prosperity. From 2008, the so-called Great Recession established new political coordinates characterised by the normalisation of precariousness and the rise of illiberal movements. Similarly, the close of the second decade of the 21st century has been marked by the end of the hopes placed on digital technology as a means of extra-political solution—analogous and complementary to the commercial—to our economic, cultural and social problems. For at least three decades—from the 1980s to…
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No. 48 — 2020
Societies in the automation era
Artificial Intelligence is a technology used to plan for the future. Planification implies intelligibility, calculability, and systematization. The future as a concept has been, in occidental cultures, closely tied to monotheism and the development of a linear narrative about societies, with a predicted end of the world, where individuals end up either in paradise or hell. This was a radical change from the narratives of classic cultures, where there was no notion of the past or prehistory, but rather a narrative of a cultural, god-given origin similar to the present. It did not anticipate change in the manner of future…
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No. 47 — 2019
Writing as a feminist act
If I say that, if you are a woman, writing is a feminist act, you might mention shades of grey or romantic novels, or those guides to being a perfect whatever that are often signed by (but not always written by) women. And that’s why I shall refine my comment: if you are a woman, writing when it is not to defend the system is an act of feminism. Writing just because, because you need to, because you have something to say. Whatever the result, if you’re writing to explore your thoughts, even if your thoughts are not feminist. It takes…