Every year in June, there is the political festival Folkemødet at Bornholm, the Danish island in the Baltic Sea, and this time, Nordic Bildung and our good friends at Data Ethics have qualified to become a Wildcard! This means that we will host an event free of charge on one of the official stages.
We are very grateful that we have been granted this opportunity, and as soon as we know the exact time and place, we will start planning our event.
Our event will be about how we can create as much awareness and political action regarding the technological development and what it is doing to our society as we have managed to create regarding climate and sustainability. This is the application text that got us in to the official program:
The private individual Elon Musk can turn Starlink on and off as he pleases, and thus decide the war in Ukraine; both Russia and Ukraine use his satellites. How can technological development receive the same political and societal attention as the climate? Our society and its institutions are built around the steam engine and the landline telephone. AI, cryptocurrencies and a number of other digital technologies are tearing the geopolitical, economic and democratic foundation away from under our feet. Ownership of the algorithms and thus the money is concentrated in a very few hands, and production, power structures, global geopolitics and much more are being completely reshaped. But it is largely not discussed politically. The environmental and climate debate has gone from “What does it matter to me?” to “What do we do?” Together with Connie Hedegaard, we will discuss how Denmark and the Danes can move from the same ignorance and indifference to political awareness and responsible development when it comes to AI and geopolitics.
As soon as we know when and where we are going to host our event, we’ll let everybody know.