The article reflects on where AI is headed and the world along with it, considering trust, ethics and safety. Implicit in artificial thinking and doomsday appraisals is the engineered divorce from reality of sublime human embodiment. Jeffrey White, Dietrich Brandt, Jan Soeffner, and Larry Stapleton, four scholars associated with AI & Society, address these issues, and more, in the following exchange.

The world is increasingly developing towards complex and chaotic behaviour. Enterprises are challenged to establish flexible but trustworthy structures of doing business within global instability. We need to educate our students today for coping with such chaotic patterns in their professional future. As an example, the student-run Europe-wide organisation ESTIEM is offering the 2-week Summer Academy (SAC) to develop the communication skills corresponding. It also means among other aims to strengthen mutual trust through interaction of the students. In 2011, one (...) of the SAC took place in Serbia. About 15 students attended it from all over Europe. In the paper, three of these students report on their experiences as a set of suggestions of how to develop further engineering and economics teaching towards international trust and stability. (shrink)

The Congress on Information and Communication during the 2000 World Engineers’ Convention in Hannover, Germany, passed a document on trends, challenges, and tasks of information and communication technologies as a set of proposals and guidelines for engineers and society which assumes validity worldwide. In 2002, the Executive Board of the Association of Engineers VDI (Germany) passed the new document Fundamentals of Engineering Ethics, which also claims universal validity, on how to deal with conflicting professional responsibilities. Thus the global validity of (...) ethics, under the impact of new technologies, has become visible as an issue widely discussed within engineering, philosophy, and society. It increasingly requires the awareness of our own responsibility towards all humans, as well as towards the natural environment and future generations. Thus the questions of how to decide and how to act challenge the interdisciplinary research field of ethics more than ever. In this paper, these elements of decisions and ethics are discussed in some detail. Subsequently they are illustrated by selected examples of ethical rules. (shrink)

During the past two centuries, the impact of technology on society has been more fundamental and far-reaching than any visionary, philosopher or science fiction author of the past could have ever imagined. The world as a whole and all its societies have been changing through the processes of developing, adapting and implementing technology.

By the very nature of information technology (IT), change and dynamism have always been significant drivers on its path to further development—and it has traditionally been the Western countries leading these. Now the picture is changing. The new high growth economies of the world (also known as BRIC countries) are increasingly pressing forward as active IT development drivers. Internal IT organizations of international companies are experiencing these global shifts firsthand and are facing changes in their traditional roles. This exploratory research (...) is aimed at clarifying the context of the impact of high growth economies on such IT departments of Western-rooted enterprises. Forty-six interviews were conducted with IT managers, HR managers and expatriates emphasizing the importance of intercultural interaction, maturing IT economies, change in IT landscape and entrepreneurship. (shrink)

In this paper, the concept of Human-Centred Technology will be described with regard to the different dimensions of workplace, groupwork and networks and in terms of the frameworks of both society and the natural environment. These different aspects of Human-Centred Systems will be illustrated by a series of case studies representing several European countries. The report covers a wide range of research fields. The emphasis is on technology: the roles of control and information technology in enterprises today — including issues (...) of applying AI — and the strategies of designing and implementing technology taking into account the specific aspects which characterize human-centred systems. (shrink)

The most fundamental changes of information exchange and communication in society today have been caused by the fast and thorough penetration of all facets of life through networked computers and mobile phones, which will both soon merge with our traditional TV. In this report, these developments will be discussed on four different levels: individuals, groups, organisations and networks. Furthermore contradictory developmental patterns are considered: global versus regional development, entrepreneurship on different scales, data availability versus data security, reality versus virtuality, education, (...) and the ethics of multimedia and the Internet. (shrink)