How does AI affect the epistemic essentials of science – its empirical capacity, including the meaning of data, understanding capacity, and creative and learning capacity?
The epistemic conditions of science have changed significantly throughout history and until recently these changes have been driven by internal factors. More recent changes of a different origin, linked to AI, have risen to the foreground and become topics of scientific debate and discourse, grant agency attention, and research re-orientations. AI is a massive transformative force in manifold areas of social life as it influences and remakes the thinking part of human systems. Scientific and technological fields are at the origin of these transformations, but they are also, or so it seems, their best client, eager not only to produce them but also to implement them in their own epistemic practices. Based on a recent study of scientific practices, Professor Karin Knorr Cetina will discuss how epistemic essentials of science are impacted by various implementations of AI: empirical capacity, including the meaning of data, understanding capacity, and creative and learning capacity. A response by Professor Steve Woolgar and a panel debate with artist and photographer Kerstin Hamilton will finally leave the space for the public to engage with all three speakers.
Language: English
Lecture, panel discussion, photography, and mingling.
Keynote Speaker
Karin Knorr Cetina, Distinguished Service Professor and of the Department of Sociology, University of Chicago.
Respondent
Steve Woolgar, Professor Emeritus both at Oxford (Marketing) and Linköping University (Science and Technology Studies).
Artist in seminar
Kerstin Hamilton, artist, researcher and lecturer in photography at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg.
Moderator
Elena Raviola, Torsten and Wanja Söderberg Professor in Design Management at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg
Host
Lena Ulrika Rudeke, programme director Jonsered Programme, University of Gothenburg
Welcome!
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About the Wisdom Seminars
The Wisdom Seminars were initiated in 2004 by the late Professor Barbara Czarniawska and the then-dean of the School of Business, Economics and Law, Rolf Wolff. At a time when thought and discourse largely revolved around the knowledge economy and the importance of information, the idea was instead to gather around the concept of wisdom. As Czarniawska wrote, "Wisdom, unlike information and even knowledge, cannot be measured and encapsulated. Wisdom is a process, it is a search for meaning that never ends. Wisdom cannot be achieved, it can only be striven for. And the way to wisdom is through constant questioning and constant reflection."
Sadly, Professor Barbara Czarniawska passed away in April 2024. In her honor, the School of Business, Economics and Law now continues this path of constructive critical reflection, questioning, and open dialogue by reviving the Wisdom Seminars.
The Barbara Czarniawska Wisdom Seminars present prominent international thinkers in conversations about current topics related to the development and organizing of contemporary society, technology, and the economy. Past participants have included Joanne Martin, Bruno Latour, Deirdre McCloskey, Zygmunt Bauman and Elena Esposito.
In a dialogue format, a thesis is presented and then discussed from various perspectives. Our hope is to offer a more nuanced view of contemporary societal developments, and that utopian and dystopian ideas can be examined and discussed in a balanced dialogue. Nothing has only good or only bad consequences, highlighting the importance to reflect on the image of our time in all its complexity.
About keynote speaker and panelists
Karin Knorr Cetina is Distinguished Service Professor and of the Department of Sociology, University of Chicago, affiliated member of the Institute for World Society Studies, University of Bielefeld and Co-PI of research on Agentic Media at the University of Siegen, Germany. Dr. Knorr Cetina published extensively in the areas of science and technology studies, the sociology and finance and social theory. Her writings include “Global Microstructures: The Virtual Societies of Financial Markets” (with Urs Bruegger, American Journal of Sociology, winner of the Theory Prize of the Theory Section of the ASA), the “Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Finance” (ed. with A. Preda,) and the book “Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge” (Harvard UP, winner of the Robert K. Merton price and the Ludwick Fleck Price of the ASA). She is currently finishing a book on the currency market as a synthetic institution and is conducting research on epistemic shifts in science and technology. Her latest honor is the election to the American Academy of Arts and Science.
Steve Woolgar is Professor Emeritus both at Oxford (Marketing) and Linköping University (Science and Technology Studies). His favourite publication of recent years is about Imposters (The Imposter As Social Theory: thinking with gatecrashers, cheats and charlatans). Current projects include AI in Surgery (with Emma Dahlin) and Managing Eternity: accountability relations in nuclear waste disposal (with Thomas Keating). He continues to work on It Could Be Otherwise - his long awaited magnum opus on the nature and limits of provocation.
Kerstin Hamilton is an artist, artistic researcher and lecturer in photography at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg. Her practice is rooted in photography, and since 2024 her work has centred on artistic research conducted in and around Onsala Space Observatory. She holds a PhD in Artistic Practice and frequently works through interdisciplinary collaborations with researchers in the natural sciences. Her work has been exhibited at institutions including Moderna Museet and the Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art, and she has curated exhibitions at Hasselblad Center and Västerbottens Museum. Her current research project, Choreographies of Science, explores scientific practices, infrastructures and the environments in which scientific knowledge is produced
