Overview

The Legal Project starts with a theoretical explanation of the term legal knowledge and especially the way in which the law ignores certain facts. From there it`s going on to a comprehensive analysis of the situation  de lege lata. Here will a perspective on fundamental rights be informative on individual reasons for a conscientious ignorance, which will be contrasted with the legal provisions, especially  the statutory health insurance. These norms are oriented towards the fundamental principle of solidarity, which has for example the consequence, that there is no need to disclose the current state of health to the insurance companies.  It is the working hypothesis of the project, that both lines of argumentation – the individual as well as the collective – can be combined and complement each other. Like this they contribute to determine, wether and where the law in its current form allows and requires a conscientious ignorance.

With regard to solidarity, there is a deep-rooted understanding that solidarity requires at least a degree of uncertainty. The ethical subproject ties in with this idea by questioning existing normative discourses on the relationship between solidarity and its respective entanglement with degrees of certainty.

 

• The first task focuses on the epistemological question of the extent to which acts of giving in solidarity are challenged by the promises of new AI-generated degrees of certainty.
• A second task is to elaborate in detail to what extent the clinical use of AI questions trust in institutions – as a prerequisite for solidarity.
• The third task is to examine the changing forms of individual and collective controllability in times of clinical use of AI. We already have a more or less sharp (culturally handed down) idea of individual possibilities of control – such as the right not to know, claims to transparency or responsibility and liability – which are necessary prerequisites not only to be able to make free decisions, but also to decide under which conditions giving in solidarity is an expression of individual freedom. An important question will be how these forms of controllability are challenged when they not only have to cope with degrees of uncertainty, but are also confronted with the idea of a growing corpus of (postulated) certainty. While this in itself is a complex issue, things become even more complicated when we think about modes of collective controllability and their embedding in more or less sharp concepts of spatiality and temporality.</small>

CwiC investigates the normative and behaviour-scientific challenges in dealing with the new possibilities for prediction in and with AI at the interface of science, society and technology. The ability to predict future developments with unprecedented accuracy affects many – if not all – areas of social life.

In the health sector in particular, the new type of prediction allows for much more precise planning, but on the other hand also calls into question central points of reference: individual self-concepts, our general distinction between illness and health, as well as traditional norms, such as the concept of basic solidarity, which is also fundamental with regard to concepts of social security.

In the CwiC subproject Economics, the handling of AI will therefore be examined more closely from the perspective of behavioral science. How do individuals deal with the new possibilities? Are better forecasting possibilities welcome at all, or rather not? Are concepts of insurance questioned or changed?

The demand for and acceptance of more precise information through the use of AI is probably strongly normative. Therefore, we are also interested in the question how social information – especially normative information – influences the use of AI. To investigate behavioral effects, we conduct economic studies at the KIT KD2 Lab. There, the participants make incentive-based decisions – i.e. decisions that have real consequences, for example of a monetary nature – to ensure a high validity of the observed results.