Artificial intelligence in HSG Focus

19 May 2020. Artificial intelligence is fascinating – and at the same time, a bit mysterious, a bit disconcerting. What precisely happens there? Will robots soon be cleverer than us?

Artificial intelligence

In the introductory interview of our dossier on artificial intelligence, this sounds substantially less unsettling: “Artificial intelligence is the idea of transferring intelligence as we can see it in human beings into a machine and simulate it there on certain hardware modules,” says Damian Borth, Full Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Research in this field was going on at a “crazy speed”, which means that the issue will occupy us increasingly intensively in the coming years and decades – in science, business, politics and society alike.

Risks and robots

Exciting! But: if, for instance, robots do more and more work for us, who will be liable if something goes wrong? This is the question that Law Professor Isabelle Wildhaber and a member of her research staff, Holly Hoch, examine in “Liability Risks in Robotics”. This is not least an issue for executives, too, who will have to extend their artificial intelligence competence to a significant extent, as Economics Professor Johannes Binswanger explains in an article. “In every artificial intelligence project, there are management decisions which will have a crucial impact on business results,” Binswanger emphasises.

Chatbots and language assistants

“Engineering of trust” is the topic of a detailed interview about chatbots and language assistants with Marketing Professor Christian Hildebrand, while retired IT Professor Hubert Oesterle delves into “Machine intelligence and quality of life” – after all, no matter how passionate we are about unfettered human curiosity and the concomitant technological progress: what do we want from it if it doesn’t provide us with a more agreeable life? “We’re bang in the middle of a rapid change in our socio-technological world and have the opportunity to use it for the benefit or detriment of mankind,” says Oesterle.

These issues and others related to artificial intelligence can be explored in the new edition of HSG Focus. As usual, the Campus column reports on background aspects and interesting facts from University life – from milestone birthdays celebrated by the CEMS programme, the Institute of Information Management and the main building of the Executive Campus, texts about a start-up for work in the third age, the women student association UNIVERSA, and HSG Library in times of corona to a research article by Gabriele Schambach and Professor Julia Nentwich (“New Work: redesigning leadership”) and Monika Kritzmöller’s column on “On- and off(line) relationships” – something that is more topical these days than ever before.