Europe needs a Plan: Science & Arts in the AI Age

As the world's major powers race to fuse AI, capital and state power into empires of compute, Europe still imports most of the digital technology its research and democracy run on. These are tools that can be switched off by decisions made elsewhere, and each encodes its own worldview. 

Yet Europe holds something distinctive: a dense network of cultural, scientific and civic institutions, and a long tradition of bringing them together to find answers to the challenges of their time. The Bauhaus was born of such a moment, in a time of crisis, as an attempt to decide what industry should be for. Its ateliers brought weavers, metalworkers and architects to the same workbench, not to decorate machines but to rethink them. Could Europe’s emerging AI Factories and quantum hubs carry the Bauhaus idea forward as an Archipelago of Ateliers for the AI age? Spaces where artists and scientists shape technology together, in the public interest? 

One of these AI Factories is in Jülich, home to Europe's first exascale supercomputer and neighbour to Germany's largest coal mine. In an opening lecture performance, José Luis de Vicente follows the shared history of these two places to explore a contradiction of our AI age: the tools that help us understand the planet also depend on its resources. 

In the discussion that follows, Francesca Bria and José Luis de Vicente, co-directors of the Archipelago of Possible Futures, are joined by artist Ólafur Elíasson; Tommaso Calarco, quantum physicist and Director of the Institute for Quantum Control at Forschungszentrum Jülich; and Bettina Kames, CEO of LAS Art Foundation. They ask how Europe can build technology of its own, what artists and scientists can create when they share the same tools, and who should decide what Europe's new infrastructures are for.