Finland and Germany are among Europe’s leading countries in the field of Artificial Intelligence. Germany has been conducting research in this field since the 1980s and is home to the world’s largest AI research centre. Finland’s national AI strategy sees artificial intelligence as a national competitive advantage, the online course ‘Elements of AI’ has appealed over 120,000 participants and attracted worldwide attention. The Finnish chairman of the EU High Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence, Pekka Ala-Pietilä, has set ethics issues as a central development point in Europe. For Germans, the protection of privacy and the avoidance of total control has always been a high priority for cultural and historical reasons. However, the discussion on ethics and morality in the AI has so far been mainly conducted in silos: programmers and companies discuss among themselves, moral philosophers discuss among themselves, regulators discuss among themselves. On the one hand we’ll bring the discourses of both countries together… on the other hand we’ll link the different perspectives and groups.
The Goethe–Institut Finnland, the German Congregation in Finland and the German–Finnish Chamber of Commerce (AHK Finland) are organizing the expert seminar in Helsinki on October 2nd 2019 to bring together the discourses in both countries and between science, business and church.