Futurological Congress

Worlds meet.

The Futurological Congress is an interdisciplinary infotainment festival where science and art, technology and culture, online and offline, come together. Dealing with future issues requires all disciplines. All the more fitting therefore is the duo of organizers, consisting of Eurac Research's Center for Advanced Studies, which since its foundation has been dealing with questions of the future across disciplinary boundaries, and the festival of contemporary culture, Transart. The main theme will be “Humanity in the age of Artificial Intelligence”: philosophers, engineers, futurologists, performance artists and media scientists, computer scientists, musicians and publicists will venture a groundbreaking look at the future of human creativity and the astounding possibilities offered by the digital age - a colorful series of scientific keynotes, discussions and art performances, partly physical in the NOI Techpark, partly live-streamed.

Artificial intelligence, robotics and algorithms accompany human everyday life like no other development of the 21st century. They wage wars, handle money flows, make diagnoses, decide on the granting of loans and shape mobility. AI software blurs the line between man and machine. But can artificial intelligence create art? Does it remain just a tool, like a painter's brush, or can it develop its own aesthetics? And what other difference is there between man and machine - perhaps the inevitable transience of humans, compared to the possibility of the quasi-immortal existence of artificial intelligence?

These and other questions were discussed, among others, by the philosophers Julian Nida-Rümelin and Riccardo Manzotti, the transhumanist Zoltan Istvan, the Google X engineer Grace C. Young, media artists Hexorcismos and Robin Meier, the musician Peter Kirn and the artistic curator Natalia Fuchs.