Amara’s law, named after Roy Amara, a president of the Institute for the Future, captures concisely the predicament we face. We overestimate the effect of technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.
Recorded at STM 50th Anniversary Frankfurt Conference
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The emergence in our time of enormously powerful computing technology has moved the concept or artificial intelligence out of science fiction and into commercial and cultural fact. Currently, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is building a strong presence in the scholarly publishing industry, where there are now many new AI-related initiatives, products, and services. These opportunities challenge us to consider the area of ethics as applied to AI uses within publishing.
In October at the STM Association 50th Anniversary Frankfurt Conference, a panel representing legal, publishing and technical perspectives discussed ethical questions for publishers as these AI solutions proliferate.
Organizations like the STM Association and the industry at large are beginning to debate – and eventually must agree to – fundamental concepts and principles of conduct that will guide editors and executives. At such a transformational moment, the panel agreed, a fundamental question arises: What does it mean to be a publisher? That one can become a publisher simply by pressing a button seems contrary to what most publishing professionals believe.
“As the managing director for books for Springer Nature, it’s a very compelling . If we don’t need any authors anymore, maybe we don’t need any editors anymore, if we can do it all by the machine. But that, of course, will not happen,” Niels Peter Thomas told moderator Chris Kenneally of CCC.
“But this does give us a completely new role. We have to think about do we want this role? Can we take this role? Should we? Or should we involve more experts, more authors to check it, to correct it? I think these are very, very important questions, but there is no final answer to them yet,” Thomas said.
Today in central London, STM Week opens at the Congress Centre for three days of programs and discussion on innovation in digital publishing.
Panelists include –
Niels Peter Thomas, Springer Nature’s managing director for books, who is responsible for a portfolio of more than 300,000 academic book titles across all subject areas for imprints including Springer, Palgrave Macmillan, J.B. Metzler, and others. In addition, Thomas has been appointed managing director of Springer Campus, which focuses on e-learning and distance learning programs.
Marjorie Hlava, president, chairman, and founder of Access Innovations. Founded in 1978, the company provides information management services such as meta-tagging, thesaurus and taxonomy creation, semantic enrichment, and workflow consulting. Her research includes productivity of content creation, natural language processing, machine translations, and machine-aided indexing.
Carlo Scollo Lavizzari, who specializes in copyright law as an attorney based in Basel, Switzerland. He advises STM as well as individual publishers on copyright law, policy, and legal affairs.
