8th Vienna Gödel Lecture, Moshe Y. Vardi: Technology Is Driving the Future, But Who Is Steering?

In the 8th Vienna Gödel Lecture, hosted by TU Wien Informatics on 27 May 2021, Moshe Y. Vardi addressed the tremendous societal benefits computing yields. In his lecture “Technology Is Driving the Future, But Who Is Steering? From the Vienna Circle to Digital Humanism,” he illustrated that computing brings with it not only societal benefits but also significant societal costs, such as labor polarization, disinformation, and smartphone addiction. The typical reaction to this crisis is to label it as an “ethical crisis”, and the proposed response is to add courses in ethics to the academic computing curriculum. Moshe Vardi argued that the ethical lens is too narrow since the real issue was how to deal with technology’s impact on society. TU Wien Informatics: https://informatics.tuwien.ac.at Vienna Manifesto on Digital Humanism: https://dighum.ec.tuwien.ac.at