Don’t break up Facebook, make it more transparent
The fever pitch over Big Tech’s market dominance culminated with a contentious US Congressional hearing a few months ago. While Google, Apple and Amazon may require new onerous regulation, Facebook’s just desserts are something it fears more than divesting itself from its strategic purchases or having to jump through insane regulatory hoops: mandated transparency.
The use of AI in HR management – Curse or blessing?
During the first Pop-Up Lab of HIIG’s AI & Society Lab an interdisciplinary team of researchers tackled pressing issues at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and HR management over…
How Conspiracy Theorists Get the Scientific Method Wrong
Philipp Hübl on the characteristics of conspiracy theories the motivation behind their spread, and rational thought as a shield against it.
The Ethics of Digitalisation
According to which criteria must chat bots be programmed to communicate without discrimination? What rules must apply in the development of artificial intelligence so that AI applications serve the common good? How do we design the algorithms that shape our society? In our interdisciplinary project “The Ethics of Digitalisation”, we work together with international partner institutions to develop concrete problem solutions...
Surveillance
The state monitors its citizens, Internet companies monitor their users – and finally we monitor ourselves and each other. Who is monitoring whom and why? What positive effects can surveillance have and when does it become a danger for a democratic society? Questions like these were posed by students of the Humboldt University of Berlin in the seminar “Tracing Surveillance – On the Trace of Surveillance” led by...
How COVID-19 impacts digital technologies
The current lockdown is boosting online activity – everything is increasingly shifting to the digital sphere. In this dossier we ask if, how and why the Corona pandemic will affect key subjects of digital technologies. What does this mean for the regulation of content on digital platforms? How is Covid-19 activating the digital society? How does it transform our online culture? How safe are tracing apps? What lessons can be learned...
Algorithmic decisions and human rights
Who is responsible if an autonomous vehicle is involved in an accident? What are the consequences of automated profiling of the unemployed? How intelligent is our use of artificial intelligence, and what visions and strategies do we need for the future? Innovations in the field of artificial intelligence are impacting nearly every area of our everyday life. However, algorithmic decision-making leads to complex human rights implications....
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Making Technology Great Again: How to Use Ethics to Save Digitalisation
Can your refrigerator order milk for you but refuse to give you a second ice cream? Should your self-driven car drive with you into a tree instead of over a…
European AI and IoT – First roundtable in cooperation with the EU Commission
The first Roundtable of HIIG’s AI & Society Lab hosted in cooperation with the EU Commission was our kick-off for an exchange on European AI and the Internet of Things…
Beyond Silicon Valley
The Internet, it is often said, provides equal access to knowledge and to markets. It opens up new opportunities for economic success and prosperity in disadvantaged regions or even continents,…
Discrimination preprogrammed?
Technology is never neutral. And even if the Internet as a medium initially invited us to deconstruct established, fixed role models and identities in supposedly new publics, to break up…
Despite digital work: hierarchies remain
Providers, such as Slack, Trello or Yam, advertise to increase the participation of employees in organisations. Their software (“enterprise social software”) creates company-internal communication channels that function similar to social…
The Coronavirus warning app should and can explain its opportunities and risks better
The warning app for contact tracing of newly corona infected persons was downloaded a good 15 million times within the first three weeks after its launch. Most of these downloads…
Live, love, learn – in 2040
How will we live, love, learn and work in 20 years? Researchers* from ten countries took a look into the future as part of the “twentyforty” project. The results can…
The Great Update of Research
The COVID 19 pandemic challenges society and its institutions. Science is particularly affected by the crisis, as it is expected to contribute with expertise to the solution of the problem….
Can European platform capitalism be sustainable?
Which business models of European platforms are viable and sustainable? That was the question asked and addressed in a virtual event last week. Senior Researcher Nicolas Friederici shares his takeaways….
Tackling COVID-19 as a Grand Challenge
Tackling COVID-19 requires coordinated, collaborative, and collective efforts that take into account other grand challenges including climate change. So how does this crisis relate to other grand challenges and how…
The Corona-Warn-App is less a technical problem than a communication problem
The much-cited “Corona-Warn-App” was critically discussed in advance in terms of data protection law and potential technical problems – but such problems are only there to be solved. The actual…
Getting Involved: Civic engagement platforms – Where volunteering begins
An Interview with Hanna Lutz by Lorenz Grünewald-Schukalla and Claudia Haas In 2018, an interdisciplinary expert commission comprising nine professors started working on the Third Engagement Report, titled The Future…
Getting Involved: Data science for good
An Interview with Johannes Müller by Lorenz Grünewald-Schukalla and Claudia Haas In 2018, an interdisciplinary expert commission comprising nine professors started working on the Third Engagement Report, titled The Future…
»Operational« control of the crowd
Although the strong surveillance of the working, as was common in the industrial work, appears to have gone out of style, it seems as if crowdworking brings it back altogether…
Digital Social Innovation: from efficiency to effectiveness in digitalization
How can technology help organizations to more effectively tackle societal challenges? In this article we introduce the concept of effectiveness in digitalization, which, we believe, is key to any digitalization…
Owning platforms – cooperatives in the digital economy
Digital trading platforms like Amazon or Uber generate billions in turnover, yet their success has been overshadowed by their drawbacks for platform users. Could cooperative models ameliorate the flaws of…
Excellence and Trust – Webinar on the EU White Paper on AI
In the context of a dialogue event organized jointly with the HIIG and the German AI Association, the European Commission presented its White Paper on Artificial Intelligence on May 4…
Using Google Trends to track social responses to COVID-19
Countries with a high peak in Google searches for the term coronavirus tend to reduce their COVID-19 infection rates. Does it make sense to associate digital information search with the…
The coronavirus pandemic and its impact on cybersecurity
The coronavirus pandemic has impacted cybersecurity in several ways. The challenges range from the infrastructure of the internet itself to the spread of disinformation online. Nevertheless, not all is lost,…
Open access: critical mass
Marcel Wrzesinski has been Open Access Officer at the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society for almost a year. The seasoned journal editor who’s been in academic publishing for about…
Digital tech and the pandemic
Perils and Opportunities How will the coronavirus pandemic affect specific kinds of digital technologies and practices? HIIG researchers offer some tentative answers. At this point, we have all been overwhelmed…
