Robert Skidelsky: The Future of Work – Is Artificial Intelligence a New Road to Serfdom?

In contemporary discussions about the future of artificial intelligence we often lose our heads. While economists offer bleak predictions of mass job losses and a deepening of already widespread precarity, Silicon Valley utopians insist that new technologies are bringing us ever closer together and will one day deliver us from work, disease and poverty. But when human life is reduced to a set of rational processes waiting to be optimized, we risk losing sight of the irreducible quality of human experience. With his characteristic attention to the subtleties of the human condition, Robert Skidelsky offers a challenging account of what it means to pursue the good life in the age of the machines.

Lord Robert Skidelsky is an outstanding political economist; author of a prizewinning biography of John Maynard Keynes and of The World After Communism (1995) (American edition The Road from Serfdom ); elected Fellow of the British Academy.

Guest: PROF. DR. MICHAL PĚCHOUČEK, MSC., Head of AI Center, CTU Prague

Moderator: LUDGER HAGEDORN, Permanent Fellow of the IWM, Vienna

Organized by IWM in cooperation with DOX – Center of Contemporary Art (Prague), and MdA (Massarykova Demokraticka Akademie).