Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier has invited national and international experts from the fields of science, politics, business and civil society to a conference in Schloss Bellevue to launch the project "The Ethics of Digitalisation" on 17 August. The opening conference and what is to be a two-year project are to focus on ethical questions of the digital transformation, for example, on the functioning of artificial intelligence and algorithms.

How can we ensure decisions taken automatically are fair, transparent and understandable? What rules should our society draw up to shape the sweeping changes we are experiencing in the modern digital age? What specific form can the ethics of the digital transformation take? How can we prevent, for example, prejudices, whether conscious or subconscious, influencing programme codes? How can we bring about international understanding on ethical standards?

The Federal President opened the conference with a speech before discussing precisely these issues with his guests: Prof. Wolfgang Schulz (Spokesperson of the European Section of the Global Network of Internet and Society Research Centers), Annette Schavan (Co-Chair of the German-Chinese Dialogue Forum), Dr Wolfgang Rohe (Executive Director at Stiftung Mercator) and Dr Sunimal Mendis (Participant in the Fellow Programme Ethics of the Digital Transformation).

Due to COVID-19 restrictions, other experts attended the event digitally and fed in their input also from Asian as well as North and South American perspectives.

With the project Ethics of the Digital Transformation, the Federal President is linking back to the priorities during his trip to China (2018) and the United States (2019) and to his speeches, for example at re:publica 2019. He has assumed the patronage of the project which is being conducted by the Global Network of Internet and Society Research Centers, an alliance of more than a hundred research institutes, in cooperation with Stiftung Mercator.

You can find out more on the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG) website.