In the digital work phase, we will intensify our interdisciplinary collaboration in bimonthly digital meetings between October 2023 and April 2024. You can find a brief recap of our first digital meeting below.
Digital work phase starts: DigitalisationDiscourses and a keynote speech by Prof. Dr Nikolaus Forgó
With an online keynote by Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Forgó (Department of Innovation and Digitalisation in Law, University of Vienna) and a lively discussion on interdisciplinary collaboration, we launched the digital work phase of DiDi on 28 November.
Prof Forgó took a critical look at the rapid technical development in the field of artificial intelligence and the regulatory reactions to it, particularly at the European level, and made a connection to the lack of genuine interdisciplinary training at the intersection of law and computer science. Finally, Prof. Forgó gave an insight into his work as a science communicator: since 2020, he has regularly conducted interviews on the Ars Boni podcast on topics relating to law, digitalisation and Covid-19 in addition to his full-time work as a university professor - in streaming and on demand. Forgó emphasised that he can reach many more people in this way than with traditional academic publications alone, but that such formats have so far only been possible by stepping out of the given structures on an individual basis.
In the ensuing discussion, we primarily addressed questions regarding the feasibility and organisation of interdisciplinary collaboration. The main focus was on clarifying the expectations and roles of the individual disciplines: what do legal scholars require or expect from computer science, for example, or what can philosophy contribute to the topic of digitalisation and AI from its own perspective? The collected statements on the expectations and potential of the disciplines involved serve as a basis for the specification of the further work in the joint research field in the project.
We will use the impulses from this digital kick-off to further explore the topic of artificial intelligence and its social implications from an interdisciplinary perspective. Over the course of 2024, we will deepen our collaboration in further internal online meetings in order to eventually bring the emerging debates in our research into the public discourse as part of the DiDi final event.
