33: Digitalization and AI as Ideology? The collective imaginary of digital technologies (Frank Marcinkowski, Fabian Anicker, Golo Flaßhoff)
The panel proposes to see collective imaginations about the utopian potential of digital technologies against the backdrop of the crisis of contemporary capitalism. This crisis is characterized by a dual uncertainty: economically, regarding the successful path out of economic stagnation and instability, and politically, regarding the correct approach to the loss of trust in the governing capabilities of states and the decline in support for democratic institutions in large segments of the population. Both challenges are intricately linked to the digital transformation of society in various ways, influencing the collective imaginaries of possible futures.
One could describe this research program as 'Digitization and AI as Ideology,' which alludes to an iconic essay title by Jürgen Habermas (1968). Ideology in the double sense that this program concerns the idea of technology in public communication and the minds of people, and not primarily the technical artifacts themselves; but also to indicate that it is fundamentally a critical, namely ideology-critical, approach to the topic that stresses the economic preconditions and effects of STI. In our track we wish to include three presentations (about 30 Minutes each) that could be directed to one of the following questions:
1) How is the Transformation of society through AI envisioned and which legitimizing functions are fulfilled by these imagined futures?
2) What are ideological elements in the political economy of Artificial Intelligence? Which particular interests are generalized, whose interests are marginalized in the contemporary discourse about AI and Digitization?
3) In what way does the discourse about AI and Digitization cohere and contrast with other political ideologies like neoliberalism, socialism, or Keynesianism?
4) How do different participants and stake holders in the digital political economy envision the benefits of a thoroughly digitized society?
We wish to contribute to the panel by filling one of the three slots for presentations. The aim of our talk is to introduce a framework for thinking about digitization discourse as a reaction to the crisis of neoliberalist politics and ideology. We wish to show that the ideological functions of digitization discourse tap into well established neoliberal ideas about the primacy of efficiency and the need for non-intervention by governments into markets, while the governing principle of the digital political economy shifts from the informational superiority of markets to the superiority of AI systems in efficiently predicting demand and creating new needs. We support claims about the ideological quality of AI discourse by presenting data from monthly opinion surveys and content analysis from the media coverage of AI that our project collected since 2020.
Keywords: AI, ideology, collective imaginary, neoliberalism, solutionism