• Speaker: Rainer Mühlhoff, University of Osnabrück, Germany
• Moderator: Klaus Staudacher, bidt, Germany

Abstract

Big data and artificial intelligence (AI) pose a new challenge for data protection when these techniques are used to make predictions about individuals. This could happen both to individuals who are not in the training data and in context of secondary use of trained models. In this talk I will use the ethical notion of “predictive privacy” to argue that trained models are the biggest blind spot in current data protection regimes and other regulatory projects concerning AI. I argue that the mere possession of a trained model constitutes an enormous aggregation of informational power that should be the target of regulation even before the application of the model to concrete cases. This is because the model has the potential to be used and reused in different contexts with few legal or technical barriers, even as a result of theft or covert business activities. The current focus of data protection on the input stage distracts from the - arguably much more serious - data protection issue related to trained models and, in practice, leads to a bureaucratic overload that harms the reputation of data protection by opening the door to the denigrating portrayal of data protection as an inhibitor of innovation.

About Rainer Mühlhoff

Rainer Mühlhoff, philosopher and mathematician, is Professor of Ethics of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Osnabrück. He researches ethics, data protection and critical social theory in the digital society. In his interdisciplinary work, he brings together philosophy, media studies and computer science to investigate the interplay of technology, power and social change.

About Klaus Staudacher

Klaus Staudacher is a Researcher at the bidt. He holds a Master’s degree in Philosophy (Philosophy, French and International Law) and has worked as a graduate teaching assistant at the chair of Philosophy and Political Theory (Prof. J. Nida-Rümelin), LMU Munich, along with other chairs of practical philosophy. His main research interests comprise issues of moral responsibility in AI systems and more generally ethical questions to do with digital transformation.

Online Event

We are looking forward to seeing you:

• Participate via Zoom (meeting: 9638 9928 143, password: 0dzqxqiy).
• The talk will also be live streamed and recorded on our YouTube Channel.
• For further announcements and information, please visit the DIGHUM Website, which also provides slides and recordings of all our past events.

The DIGHUM Lecture Series

Digital Humanism deals with the complex relationship between man and machine. It acknowledges the potential of Informatics and IT. At the same time, it points to related apparent threats such as privacy violations, ethical concerns with AI, automation, and loss of jobs, and the ongoing monopolization on the Web. The Corona crisis has shown these two faces of the accelerated digitalization—we are in a crucial moment in time.

For this reason, we started the DIGHUM Lecture Series, a new initiative with regular online events to discuss the different aspects of Digital Humanism. We will have a speaker on a specific topic (30 minutes) followed by a discussion of 30 minutes every second Tuesday of each month at 5:00 PM CEST. This crisis seriously affects our mobility, but it also offers the possibility to participate in events from all over the world—let’s take this chance to meet virtually.

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