Helga Nowotny
Список книг автора Helga NowotnyIn AI We Trust
One of the most persistent concerns about the future is whether it will be dominated by the predictive algorithms of AI – and, if so, what this will mean for our behaviour, for our institutions and for what it means to be human. AI changes our experience of time and the future and challenges our identities, yet we are blinded by its efficiency and fail to understand how it affects us. At the heart of our trust in AI lies a paradox: we leverage AI to increase our control over the future and uncertainty, while at the same time the performativity of AI, the power it has to make us act in the ways it predicts, reduces our agency over the future. This happens when we forget that that we humans have created the digital technologies to which we attribute agency. These developments also challenge the narrative of progress, which played such a central role in modernity and is based on the hubris of total control. We are now moving into an era where this control is limited as AI monitors our actions, posing the threat of surveillance, but also offering the opportunity to reappropriate control and transform it into care. As we try to adjust to a world in which algorithms, robots and avatars play an ever-increasing role, we need to understand better the limitations of AI and how their predictions affect our agency, while at the same time having the courage to embrace the uncertainty of the future.
Manifiesto por el progreso social
El progreso social puede verse como un objetivo a alcanzar o como una amenaza de la que conviene apartarse. En décadas recientes hemos atestiguado el declive de la pobreza mundial y el arribo de la democracia a numerosos países, la ampliación de programas de salud y educación, con innegables mejoras en la esperanza y la calidad de vida, pero a la vez reina una atmósfera de escepticismo sobre la posibilidad —y la conveniencia— de inducir un progreso social como el alcanzado por las sociedades más desarrolladas, con su cauda de desigualdad y sus costos ambientales. En busca de soluciones a los problemas globales, el Panel Internacional sobre Progreso Social reunió a más de 300 científicos sociales para que, con base en estudios novedosos, con una vocación multidisciplinaria y una mirada prospectiva, revisaran numerosas opciones de cambio social a largo plazo, exploraran los retos actuales y propusieran formas de mejorar las principales instituciones de las sociedades modernas. De ese trabajo colaborativo surge este manifiesto, en el que el ánimo utópico convive con el pragmatismo, en el que la búsqueda de justicia es compatible con el fortalecimiento de actores clave, como la empresa o el mercado. La conclusión es simple y a la vez entraña enormes complicaciones: sí es posible una sociedad mejor pero urge armonizar diversas fuerzas. Para lograr un cambio cultural de grandes proporciones, se requiere una audaz mezcla de idealismo y sensatez. Es lo que este manifiesto ofrece.
Time
Helga Nowotny's exploration of the forms and meaning of time in contemporary life is panoramic without in any way partaking of the blandness of a survey. From the artificial time of the scientific laboratory to the distinctively modern yearning for one’s own time, she regards every topic in this wide-ranging book from a fresh angle of vision, one which reveals unsuspected affinities between the bravest, newest worlds of global technology and the most ancient worlds of myth. –Lorraine Daston, University of Chicago This book represents a major contribution to the understanding of time, giving particular attention to time in relation to modernity. The development of industrialism, the author points out, was based upon a linear and abstract conception of time. Today we see that form of production, and the social institutions associated with it, supplanted by flexible specialization and just-in-time production systems. New information and communication technologies have made a fundamental impact here. But what does all this mean for temporal regimes? How can we understand the transformation of time and space involved in the bewildering variety of options on offer in a postmodern world? The author provides an incisive analysis of the temporal implications of modern communication. She considers the implications of worldwide simultaneous experience, made possible by satellite technologies, and considers the reorganization of time involved in the continuous technological innovation that marks our era. In this puzzling universe of action, how does one achieve a 'time of one's own'? The discovery of a specific time perspective centred in the individual, she shows, expresses a yearning for forms of experience that are subversive of established institutional patterns. This brilliant study, became a classic in Germany, will be of interest to students and professionals working in the areas of social theory, sociology, politics and anthropology.
Re-Thinking Science
Re-Thinking Science presents an account of the dynamic relationship between society and science. Despite the mounting evidence of a much closer, interactive relationship between society and science, current debate still seems to turn on the need to maintain a 'line' to demarcate them. The view persists that there is a one-way communication flow from science to society – with scant attention given to the ways in which society communicates with science. The authors argue that changes in society now make such communications both more likely and more numerous, and that this is transforming science not only in its research practices and the institutions that support it but also deep in its epistemological core. To explain these changes, Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons have developed an open, dynamic framework for re-thinking science. The authors conclude that the line which formerly demarcated society from science is regularly transgressed and that the resulting closer interaction of science and society signals the emergence of a new kind of science: contextualized or context-sensitive science. The co-evolution between society and science requires a more or less complete re-thinking of the basis on which a new social contract between science and society might be constructed. In their discussion the authors present some of the elements that would comprise this new social contract.