"None of my col­leagues think that machines will ever gain con­scious­ness. That’s just noth­ing we focus our research on." With these words, Machine Learn­ing pro­fess­or Robert Bamler recently tried to adjust a lively dis­cus­sion about Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence (AI) at a Pub­lic Engage­ment event in Tübin­gen. Where­as machine learn­ing research sees AI primar­ily as a use­ful tool, per­cep­tions in pub­lic dis­course are more strongly shaped by desires, fears and fanci­ful ima­gin­a­tions driv­en by nar­rat­ives and myths.

Reach­ing an under­stand­ing between these per­spect­ives is a com­plex task: already with­in research on AI dif­fi­culties of estab­lish­ing com­mon ground become appar­ent. After all, vari­ous dis­cip­lines are involved, from com­puter sci­ence and math­em­at­ics to media and cul­tur­al stud­ies. Such dif­fer­ing back­grounds neces­sar­ily res­ult in dif­fer­ent assess­ments of wheth­er AI should be explain­able or not, wheth­er AI is a black box or not, or even on how to define arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. Find­ing com­mon ground for a pub­lic dis­cus­sion about AI there­fore must incor­por­ate the recon­tex­tu­al­iz­a­tion of highly com­plex research, build­ing mutu­al under­stand­ing with­in the dis­cip­lines and sub­sequently aim­ing at enabling an informed pub­lic dis­course about AI.

In short open­ing state­ments, our speak­ers will dis­cuss the pos­sib­il­it­ies and rami­fic­a­tions of com­mu­nic­a­tion about AI research from their per­spect­ives. Then, we will try to cre­ate com­mon ground live at PCST, involving the audi­ence by address­ing them in dif­fer­ent roles: as non- experts, they are invited to share their own con­cep­tions of AI via sur­veys and short Q&A ses­sions; and as research­ers and prac­ti­tion­ers of sci­ence com­mu­nic­a­tion, their expert­ise is needed in design­ing solu­tion strategies. Togeth­er we will engage with both the ques­tion of how research­ers from dif­fer­ent dis­cip­lines can find com­mon ground and the ques­tion of what role prac­ti­tion­ers play in facil­it­at­ing the estab­lish­ment of such com­mon ground between research­ers as well as between sci­ence and the public.