The initiative DIGHUM lectures started with regular online events to discuss the different aspects of Digital Humanism. The bidt and the TU Wien are cooperation partners for DIGHUM lecture series.
Speaker: Rainer Mühlhoff (University of Osnabrück, Germany)
Moderator: Klaus Staudacher (bidt, Germany)
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 the Series
A roughly bi-weekly seminar offers presentations and panels from worldwide thought leaders. It is typically held on Tuesday afternoons at 17:00 CET.
The bidt and the TU Wien are cooperation partners for 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.
For this reason, a new initiative — DIGHUM lectures — started with regular online events to discuss the different aspects of Digital Humanism.
We will have one or more speakers on a specific topic followed by a discussion, or panel discussions, depending on topic and speakers. The exact dates will be announced at least two weeks before.
Participate via Zoom
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Archive and Resources of Lecture Series