The project group investigates the formation of social, legal and ethical norms in the development and use of digital technologies and artificial intelligence. The overall goal of the research group is to identify effective mechanisms at the intersection of law, ethics, technology, and the market that help regulate the development of AI and digital technologies through interdisciplinary research.

The subproject at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology focuses on the ever-growing role of artificial intelligence (AI) and related practices in financial markets and the banking sector. Both Germany and the European Union have recognized the importance of AI technologies and put its regulation on their agenda. However, the regulatory and legal framework lags far behind technological developments in this area. AI has become an integral part of financial markets and banking services. For example, the introduction of AI-driven credit scoring or Robo-advisory, mostly autonomous systems that use existing personal data and machine learning to develop the underlying algorithms.

To examine these more-than-human interactions and tease out how AI participates in the making of financial markets, the Institute’s anthropological study employs an analytical framework that draws on ethnographic as well as a range of transdisciplinary methods. An essential aspect of the project is the interdisciplinary collaboration in a group of scholars from the fields of philosophy, law, economics and computer science.

Project Management: Prof. Dr. Martina Klausner, Research Assistant: Matthias Kloft, M.A.