The Illusion of Control: Living With the Digital Others

Wednesday, October 4, 2023 | 17:00 | KUNSTHAUS Zurich, Chipperfield Building

The amazing performance of the latest generative AI, like GPT-4, designed to communicate with us like a human, raises some fundamental questions. Given our anthropomorphic tendencies, what will it do to our use of language, our sense of self, and what are the other impacts when the boundaries between artificial and human become increasingly blurred? In the early 18th century Giambattista Vico, the Italian Enlightenment thinker, claimed verum ipsum factum—we understand only what we make. Increasingly, today’s world is of our making, but what happens if we no longer understand what we make? Are we bound to be trapped in the illusion of control or can we regain control? If so, which kind of control?

HELGA NOWOTNY is professor emerita of science and technology studies at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, and founding member and former president of the European Research Council (ERC).