Expertise in digital Transformation

What is expertise? Who owns it? And where does it originate from? These questions are not new but have become more pressing with the advent of digital transformation. Digitalization is becoming constantly more crucial in producing knowledge and generating expertise. Far beyond the automatization of existing standardized and coordinated procedures, numerous digital applications are increasingly generating information that directly influence social and academic knowledge production and decision-making.

Present debates, particularly those about generative AI such as ChatGPT, highlight significant tensions: At what point do digital tools cease to support knowledge creation and begin to fundamentally influence or replace traditional practices of knowledge production and human expertise? While AI has presented numerous opportunities for the generation of expertise, concerns arise over the quality and validity of the knowledge produced.

With this conference, we thus aim to explore questions of expertise in digital transformation both with regard to different areas of society and to discuss them comparatively:

• What is the impact of the use of digital applications in knowledge-based areas of work, ranging from industry to administration, but also in the judicial system or science?
• How does digitalization change expertise and also experts themselves?
• How are practices of knowledge production transformed and what do we regard as expertise?
• How do the processes outlined above shape collective perceptions of the social reality?

Please register for the event by 15 May 2024.

Download the Conference Program here.