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Dr. Ignas Kalpokas, "Societies at an AI Crossroads: Choices and Value Conflicts"

Vortrag auf Englisch

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The Department of Transcultural Media Studies of the Middle East is pleased to invite Ignas Kalpokas

"Societies at an AI Crossroads: Choices and Value Conflicts"

As contemporary societies undergo profound transformations driven by artificial intelligence and related technologies, a unilinear vision of ‘progress’ dominates public discourse. Across domains such as education, heritage, creativity, biology, and technology, hegemonic (typically progressivist) narratives overshadow alternative (critical) ways of framing present and future, precluding us from recognizing moral and technological crossroads. A counterpoint, mapping how futures can be shaped rather than received, is required. While decisions in these domains are molded by engrained ideological, political, and economic assumptions associated with rhetoric of inevitability, it is crucial to recall that we are making not only technical and economic choices, but moral and societal ones as well: between maximizing efficiency and safeguarding plurality; between treating technological possibilities as imperatives and critically evaluating their desirability; between moral blindness and care. Only if we recover the capacity to see the options available can we play an active role in choosing the future shape of societies – and of humanity itself.

This talk is based on the forthcoming book: Societies at an AI Crossroads: Choices and Value Conflicts, by Ignas Kalpokas and Julija Kalpokiené.

Ignas Kalpokas is Associate Professor and head of MA in Future Media and Journalism at Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania. In the academic year 2025/2026 he is also a visiting researcher at the Karlsruher Institut für Technologie. His research interests include societal, cultural, and political impacts of AI, media theory, political communication, disinformation, and post-truth, and technology ethics. He has published nine books, including A Political Theory of Post-Truth (2019) and Algorithmic governance: Politics and law in the post-human era (2019), as well as nearly 50 journal articles and book chapters on these topics.

Organised by the Department of Transcultural Media Studies of the Middle East.