Societies at an AI Crossroads

Choices and Value Conflicts
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-041-20266-0
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 144 Seiten, Format (B × H): 138 mm x 216 mm

Reihe: Routledge Focus on Digital Media and Culture

This book highlights some of the crucial crossroads - moments in which choices as to the future relationship between humans and digital technologies have to be made - that societies face in light of the growing development and adoption of AI.

As contemporary societies undergo profound transformations driven by artificial intelligence and related technologies, a unilinear vision of inevitable ‘progress’ and development increasingly dominates public discourse. This book offers a counterpoint, challenging such deterministic narratives by mapping out the complex crossroads where futures ought to be shaped rather than passively received. Exploring a multiplicity of domains as diverse as education, heritage, creativity, the biological and technological boundaries of humans, work, war, and space colonialism, both the dominant (typically progressivist) and alternative (critical) ways of framing the present and the future are outlined, identifying choices to be made. The book teases out the underlying tendencies and underscores a recurring necessity to make value choices as to our further development, not only as societies but also as humanity and in terms of regulatory choices. It reveals how decisions in these domains are shaped by engrained intellectual, ideological, political, value-based, and economic assumptions, often hidden beneath the rhetoric of inevitability. These crossroads are not just technical or economic choices, but moral and societal: between maximising efficiency and safeguarding plurality; between treating technological possibilities as imperatives and critically evaluating their desirability; between moral blindness and care. By illuminating the options available, the book invites readers to take an active role in choosing the future shape of societies – and of humanity itself.

This interdisciplinary and creative text will benefit all graduate-level and scholarly readers working on AI within the fields of media and communication, cultural studies, sociology, and cultural anthropology.

Zielgruppe

Academic, Postgraduate, and Undergraduate Advanced

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kalpokas, Ignas

Kalpokiene, Julija

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften Medienwissenschaften
• Sozialwissenschaften Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften Kommunikationswissenschaften
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Mediensoziologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Wissenssoziologie, Wissenschaftssoziologie, Techniksoziologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. A One-Way Street or Crossroads: On Thinking Otherwise

2. Solutionist Imaginaries: AI and Education

3. (Re)locating the Author: AI and Creativity

4. Many Problems, Few Solutions: AI and Heritage

5. Towards the (Last) Frontier: AI Persons

6. From Post-Work to Transhumanist Dreams: AI for Everything

7. From Robot Wars to Space Colonialism: AI and Entitlement to Violence

8. Conclusions

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Ignas Kalpokas is Associate Professor and Senior Researcher at Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania, where he also leads MA Future Media and Journalism. His research focuses on the societal, cultural, and political impact of emerging digital technologies, political communication, post-truth and fake news, and media theory.

Julija Kalpokiene is a Lithuanian qualified attorney and Junior Research Fellow at Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania. Her research focuses on internet regulation, cybercrime, technology regulation, with a particular focus on AI and creativity, and more generally, intellectual property and privacy law, and AI in education and culture.