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.

This consortium provides a thinking space for social science research – across the Eurasian continent and beyond – in order to gather researchers, experts, and practitioners in the expanding field of AI aiming to channel their analysis regularly to policy makers. It aims at fostering and stimulating interdisciplinary collaborations as well as public conversations about the potential and the limit of AI. To fill the knowledge and research gap, systematic comparisons among different political systems, cultures, and regulatory environments are needed to understand better the transformative social and political effects of AI technologies: the co-evolving of new kinds of “social” relations, new forms of innovation and authority around the world. The co-evolving of new and different social relations represents as well a deep political process from global dimension.

Objectives

By bringing together researchers, experts, and practitioners on a regular basis in order to develop common intellectual themes, frameworks, and research agendas across Europe and Asia, the Consortium will:

• Strengthen multidisciplinary social science research about AI and make it a central pillar of knowledge production alongside with engineering, informatics, economics and ethics.
• Nurture a new generation of scholars who can translate and communicate between different cultural and political contexts in Europe and Asia while conducting cutting-edge research and delivering policy advice on AI.
• Support and inform public policy making and public debate internationally and on different domestic administrative levels and giving support for an informed public debate on AI.
• Facilitate the development of new research themes in conversation with enterprises and civil society actors; develop joint funding applications, joint research projects, and joint publications.