Bauer's History

 In late august the European parliament launched new legislation on AI, and scholarship probably will spend the coming decades interpreting it. Due to this being a new legislation, this is also something that will take time before can see it's full extent and application. This is something that is quite problematic, since the world right now are screaming for more and more people with knowledge on AI, from it's technical development to legislation and policy. When I was working out a new course that I have taught at Lund University this fall, I therefore had to turn to the very slim literature on it and I actually found two very interesting articles.  The first was written by Stefan Larsson which adressed the theme of legal pace. From this perspective, there is always a tension between law and technology, since latter often develops faster than first. Furthermore, AI often comes with a huge bagage technologically speaking which will give us several problems when trying to regu...

 For the past years I have come to focus more and more on digital humanities both consciously and subconsciously. Starting with the conscious part I have undertaken a research project on creating digital archival collections in which I aim to investigate the ethical practices within the archival sector when creating new collections. I have also come to include perspectives in my teaching, were for instance teach course on AI and archival science at Lund university. On a more subconscious level I have also come to work with material that is avaible online, such as in my thesis were much of my source material was already digitised. I have also come to use data-processing softwares such Nvivo and Tropy. Likewise much of the material use in my teaching consists of sources that are already digitized. This can be seen as digital revolution 1.5 with the first being the inclusion of digital tools such as cameras, computers and wordediting software which became available already in the 198...

 An old tale is that when locomotion was invented during the 19th century it came with a medical discourse, we’re people were afraid of their inner organs becoming unarranged or that the human mind could not phantom incredible speeds of 40 km/h. Similar aspects can be high lighted with the case of computer games containing graphic violence, leading to outburst of violence all over society. As astonishing that it might seem for people living and partaking in these debates, some decades later society is still here.  And what’s more interesting is all of this fear of AI. For the last months I’ve spent allot of time reading on it from both a technical, social, judicial and ethical dimension. Some authors, such as Sheikh et al argues that this is a system technology which similar to the early cars will transform society. And what has struck me is that  when the car was invented in the 20th century it was both viewers as a threat to people’s health from the danger of travelling...

 I just finished reading AI ethics by Coeckelbergh. This is actually course literature for a course on AI, digitization and archival science which I will start teaching next week at Lund University. The idea to include it as mandatory reading was from a colleague of mine, and after reading it through I think it has some very strong points as well as some weaknesses. Amongst it strengths is the first chapters which deals with various aspects of AI such the difference between general artificial intelligence and artificial general intelligence. It also highlights some aspects of machine learning and deep learning, which is of great interest to novices in the field. Even though I personally have a strong interest in AI, my skills in programming are not very strong even though I can read basic code and understand what it do. According to me it is therefore of importance to people wishing to learn how to utilise AI to learn of the different forms, since once you go deeper into it is impo...

 In recent years I have become more and more obsessed with AI, much like everyone else in society. In this regard I am very fascinated by two different aspects were the first is simply the implementation of AI in my own discipline of history. In this regard I can mainly see two were clearcut utilizations of artificial intelligence were the first in software such as Transkribus, which transcribes old hand-written records to modern print in a matter of minutes. Transkribus have actually become smart enough to have a 99,3 percent correctness, compared to the human 99,7 percent correctness. Even though we still have a bit to wander with transkribus it will probably change what subjects historians can dwelve into, since one of the key difficulties with older periods is the material aspect and reading of texts. Once this obstacle is overcome it would perhaps not require as much training to go into the medieval or early modern period. A second aspect of this is that AI will probably, give...

Y ou would have to be sleeping under a rock for the past year if you have not heard of the praise of AI in contemporary society. Basically, AI is described as a new tool in which we can process information faster than ever before, and utilize it to make informed decisions. Many of the proponents of AI believe that there does not exist a single factor in society which will not be affected by the so called AI revolution, and perhaps they are right. Still, AI also brings forth significant challenges to the scientific community which I do not believe that we have discussed at length yet. In this post I will highlight both how I utilize external AI (i.e. AI that is created solely for being AI and not included in common programmes such as Word or Chrome) and what I still would not trust it with.  As a scholar my main tool for work is the written word. Since english is not my native tongue, this however becomes complicated when working with the international scientific community. In my pu...

 When I am asked to define history as a subject I often find myself in a complex situation. Since atleast the 1960's history have been influenced by various sciences, from sociology to political science and urban planning. History thus have not a theoretical foundation, instead we would speak of multiple histories. However, one aspect that I often highlight is that history have a large focus on contuinity (what remains the same) and change as well as explaining how the human experience are subject to both genealogies and sudden breaks. The second aspect I often speak about is that history have a very strong source criticism, an aspect that comes from the launch of history as a academic subject in the 19th century, when Leopold von Ranke started to write history from actual archive records rather than myths and folklore. This aspect of source-criticism is crucial to both my identity as a researcher and as an historian. However, given the rise of digital society, the possibility for ...

Following the advances in post-modernism historians have become rather aware that they do not produce neutral knowledges, but rather that the questions they ask to some degree also mirrors the questions historians ask. A clear example of this is Donna Haraways critique of the idea of "neutral" social scientists, since this idea often have taken people in academia as point of depature, thereby creating an image of the the neutral research as a middle-class male in his midforties without thinking of the limitations such as person have on what becomes possible to ask.  Given my awarness that openAI is not fully transparent of its sources, and thus neither transparent in which taken for granted assumptions that shapes it's answer (an aspect that fails to meet the standard of Tracy's good qualitative research ), I became curious on what would happened if I started to make a conversation with it with my own area of expertis as a point depature. I therefore asked OpenAI the...

During the past two years there have been a virtual explosion on the talk of AI. As much often is the case the research community is divided into those who believe that this will transform our live (so called techno-optimists), and those who calls for a slower process (so called techno-pessimist). Growing up in the 1990's I can see where the techno-pessimist are coming from, since popular culture are filled with AI:s that have grown out of control. The very classic action movies in the terminator saga tells the story of a weaponised AI that turned against humanity, and thus nearly extinguished human life through nuclears arms. Similar notions are based on the contemporary "The creator" in which humanity fights against an AI accused of nuking los angeles, which in the tend shows the be the result (spoiler) of human error, rather than the AI:s own choices. The plot-twist of The Creator and Terminator saga illustrates an often forgetten point in the debate, namely the defint...