Imagine a dog with a collar and a leash. With limited freedom, its path ends abruptly. With limited possibilities, it is under duress. It can be controlled, led through life, will be held back from beautiful things, protected from the bad, with its endeavour and exploration attempts end in nothing. The dog’s desires have its master in the collar and the leash. The tethered dog succumbs to the will that acts on the collar through the leash. It can be punished with a tight collar, or re-warded with treats and amenities. We risk being like the dog.

We must consider and choose now – based on an interdisciplinary dialogue between AI, entrepreneurship, art, and ethics – how we will hold the leash and choose the path, rather than becoming the dog of machines.

In order to avoid becoming the dog, this interdisciplinary seminar strives to develop a vision and concrete steps how AI in conjunction with art, entrepreneurship as well as with ethics will bring about a “golden age” for humans and the planet.

This seminar is a joint seminar between the ETH Computer Science Department and its AI Center as well as University of Lucerne’s Institute of Social Ethics ISE.

In the seminar we will look at the current urgent topic of ethics in digital transformation from a ethical, social, and political perspective, from an artistic perspective and from an entrepreneurial perspective.

In transdisciplinary tandems the students will be develop their own Arttech business ideas and present these.

Kirchschläger, Peter G., Digital Transformation and Ethics. Ethical Considerations on the Robotization and Automatization of Society and Economy and the Use of Artificial Intelligence. Baden-Baden: Nomos 2021.

Crawford, Cate, Atlas of AI, New Haven: Yale University Press 2021.

Audry, Sofian, Art in the Age of Machine Learning, Cambridge MA: The MIT Press 2021.