„Digital capitalism - all power to the corporations?“

6/7 November 2018, FES Berlin
Event organised by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in cooperation with
with the IGZA and other partners

The IGZA was once again a partner of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation's „Digital Capitalism“ conference in Berlin this year. Under this year's main theme „All power to the corporations?“, experts from academia and politics as well as representatives from trade unions, associations and business discussed topics such as labour and the welfare state of the future, smart cities and digital monopolies. The IGZA is organising three of the 14 specialist forums: The forum on the topic of Welfare State 4.0 debated approaches to innovative working time policies and concepts of social security in the digital world of work. The core issue was how traditional social insurance and basic security systems can be further developed in order to utilise the potential of shorter working hours in the future (see IGZA Working Paper #4).

Questions about the need for European institutions in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) were at the centre of the second IGZA forum. One of the topics discussed here was the regulation of access to large amounts of data, which is important for the development and application of artificial intelligence. The digital economy was also the focus of the third IGZA expert forum: In comparison and in connection with financial capitalism, the discussion centred on how crisis-prone so-called digital capitalism is. In many other forums, panel discussions and debates on and off the stage, over 800 participants (as well as several thousand online) discussed the question of how the potential of artificial intelligence can be used for society as a whole and how digitalisation can be shaped. More information about the congress is available here.