If “the internet is terra incognita”, as Chancellor Angela Merkel has put it, then what even is AI? Artificial Intelligence (AI) is still in its infancy, yet it already permeates societies and markets around the world. While there is no commonly agreed definition of what exactly AI is, applications and AI supported devices are used in fields ranging from intelligent manufacturing and logistics to household appliances and smart cities, and from the education and health sectors to defense systems and autonomous driving.

AI promises exciting solutions to various social and economic problems. But it also is imbued with a range of negative ethical implications often reflecting the unclear interconnection between human capacity and autonomous machine learning in the era of AI. Despite these ethical concerns about AI emerging at the forefront of non-technical research, a broader social science research agenda on AI is only slowly taking shape. Consequently, the political effects and social ramifications remain obscure and poorly understood.