Seminar: Knowledge work in the age of AIThe case of chess grandmasters

21 September 2023, 11:00 am

 Johannes Dahlke who is an expert on the responsible use of artificial intelligence, with a focus on the economics of AI and human-AI collaborations in knowledge work will give a seminar  on the 9/21 from 11-12 am in the Moorweidenstr. 18 room 0029.

Those who want to join the seminar please let me know: isdi-teamassistenz.bwl@uni-hamburg.de

Abstract
The game of chess has long been used as a testbed for artificial intelligence (AI) research. At the same time, the diffusion of AI applications has also affected the knowledge work conducted by chess grandmasters. I investigate how the technological paradigm shift from rule-based systems towards connectionist AI (i.e., neural network models) has led this occupational community out of an era of creative depression and into an era of strategic innovation; and show that this development is driven by changes in human-AI interaction and second-order effects in their socio-economic environment. Drawing on grounded theory, I conduct interviews with world-elite chess players and machine learning engineers developing chess programs. I find that the diversification of AI models has subjected chess grandmasters to increased occupational complexity stemming from analytical ambiguity, technological dynamism, and competitive uncertainty. Members of the occupation have responded by instantiating new occupational roles as machine-behavior specialists, meta-experts, and orchestrators, which are interrelated in a holistic network of identities. Resolving dissonance within this holistic identity structure depends not only on the human’s and the technology’s characteristics, but heavily on environmental enablers and constraints. I theorize that consonance between identities determines the degree of conjoined agency of human-AI ensembles and meaningfulness in knowledge work.