Description
Join the DigiCluster!
Digital transformations challenge modern societies on many dimensions. We have rapidly gone through a sequence of deep and pervasive social changes driven by progressive layers of digital technologies. Improvements in computing power led to increased digitisation. The internet revolutionised communication, data collection, and information access.
The artificial intelligence (AI) evolution, though nascent, introduces advanced systems capabilities, from predictive analytics to robotic functionalities. The implications of AI, both promising and perilous, will affect society's future trajectory. AI opens great opportunities for individual and social flourishing, as well as serious risks for freedoms and democracy, so that the ways in which it is deployed will contribute to determining the future of our societies, and ultimately of humanity itself.
Digital technologies influence productive, administrative, and political processes, but also contribute to determine how we act, interact, and understand ourselves, our role in society, and the communities in which we participate. They transform the workplace, the allocation of resources in society, the formation of social attitudes and opinions, the patterns and dynamic of social interactions, and the distribution and exercise of power. Their deployment generates a whole set of new social, ethical, and legal questions.
Our cluster investigates such questions. It is based on six main perspectives and related questions.
- Technology: What are the most relevant digital technologies from the perspective of their impact on society?
- Impacts: What opportunities and risks do digital technologies create for the economy, politics, media, law, entertainment, and culture?
- Labour and Capital: How do digital technologies change the nature of work, as technologies substitute human work or merge with it? How do digital technologies change the nature of firms and markets?
- Government: How do digital technologies change the nature of the State, as governments rely on digital technologies in all processes of regulation, administration, and adjudication?
- Regulation: How can the development and deployment of digital technologies be governed — through economic, social, and legal instruments? How can society beneficially shape the direction of technological change?
- Geopolitics: Is the EU leadership in the regulation of digital technologies a vector of soft or hard power on the international scene? Can the EU successfully compete with the US and China through the development of digital technologies? How can the EU promote new technologies while safeguarding its social values?
Research on digital transformations in social sciences is currently very fragmented. Language and focal points of analysis diverge both within and across disciplines. This is not surprising given the new nature of the digital challenges that artificial intelligence especially raises. A key to tackling these issues is to discuss them in joint activities, which naturally introduce a common language, focus across the groups, and leverage cross-disciplinary insights.
The focus will be on socio-technical innovation, namely on the development of initiatives that merge technological and social ingredients to address current challenges, manage risks, and provide frameworks for the future beneficial deployment of digital technologies. On each selected topic, multiple contributions will be sought from different disciplines and perspectives, but with the objective of coming to a shared focus, a shared understanding, and a critical analysis of proposals.
The activities of the group aim to contribute on several dimensions. First, they bridge disciplinary gaps, helping scholars enrich their field view and possibly, but not necessarily, producing interdisciplinary research. Second, from a societal perspective, the activities of the cluster are highly relevant. In addition to bettering our understanding of the societal implications of digital technologies, they are immediately related to policy issues. Policy has been the common theme of past activities and will continue to be so.
With the refocus of the EUI's former 'Technological change and society' interdisplinary research cluster, the DigiCluster marks a new page in studying the social, economic, and political impact of digital technologies.
DigiCluster Library Information Specialist: Valentina Spiga
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