Part 2: While machines cannot become intelligent, they can be used as an instrument of rule. In this talk, I analyse the function of AI and digitisation for national and transnational power structures and its effect on the legitimacy of rule. How is power held and maintained in modern mass societies, what is the role for technology in this rule via power of action, instrumental power, authoritative power and data setting power? Digitisation and AI can fulfil the requirements of Bentham’s panopticon: They can enable the observation of the actions of each individual that uses digital technology, can massively influence and restrict the perception of the world via digital media, and can support the control of the body of the individual when digital devices are implanted into the body (such as chips) or when regular medical procedures are linked to digital certificates enabling movement and financial transactions. In the usage pattern of digitisation and AI which is now envisaged in the Northern hemisphere, both will contribute to a massive decline in the legitimacy of rule and to a renaissance of fear as the basic mode of society formation.

Jobst Landgrebe, born in 1970, studied philosophy, medicine, biochemistry and mathematics. After he obtained his MD/PhD in 1998, he worked as biochemist and biomathematician for 8 years at the Max-Planck-Institute for Psychiatry and Neurogenetics and the DFG Centre for Cell Biology. He then switched to the private sector in 2006, where he has worked in various research and development positions, always with a focus in AI, and mostly for the pharmaceutical industry. He regularly publishes in the fields of the theory of science and political philosophy. He teaches theory of science as a guest professor at the Universities of Buffalo and Lugano. Jobst published recently a book in Routledge co-authored with the philosopher Barry Smith in which they argue that machines will never rule the world.

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