Project Details
Projekt
Pioneer Communities: Imagining ComAI and its possible futures
Applicant
Professor Dr. Andreas Hepp
Subject Area
Communication Sciences
Term
since 2024
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 516511468
Taking historical developments at Stanford University and MIT as well as today’s developments at OpenAI (GPT-4) and Aleph Alpha (Luminous) as examples, P1 focuses on ComAI’s pioneer communities: groups who create “social horizons” for future development through their imaginative and experimental practices. P1 combines a historical perspective on earlier pioneer communities and tech movements as their contextual figurations, a perspective on the current influences of both, and a perspective on pioneer communities’ contribution to the spread of ComAI. The analysis is guided by four research questions: 1) How did tech movements and pioneer communities prefigure today’s ComAI? 2) What characterizes their imaginaries of ComAI and their influence on current ComAI developments? 3) What do pioneer communities contribute to the spread of ComAI? 4) What role do pioneer communities play in the sociomaterial constitution of ComAI? To answer these research questions, P1 uses a mixed-method design analyzing historical sources, media discourses, interviews, observations, and online-networks in Germany, the UK and the US.
DFG Programme
Research Units
