“May you live in interesting times!” runs a famous curse. And there is certainly nothing boring about the world we now live in.

In the past twelve months, we have been absorbing the implications of the Russo-Ukrainian war and managing its economic fallout. But the world has also been grappling with the advances in Artificial Intelligence. ChatGPT and other highly complex programs mimicking human neural networks threaten to turn society upside down. The promise of these technologies is enormous, but so is the temptation to outsource human creativity to machines.

These moments of dramatic and rapid change often produce not only the most colorful but also the most dangerous characters, promising easy political and economic routes out of the crisis: simple solutions which deny complexity, seeking scapegoats, the closing down of reasoned discourse, and a retreat from collective approaches in favor of narrow winner-takes-all solutions.

At the Vienna Humanities Festival 2023, we were looking at promises made in the past — some realized, some revealed as fantasy and even nightmare. We looked at the promises being made right now: how to escape war, how to manage economic decline; how to battle climate change; how to resist autocracy and intolerance. We asked which solutions being offered are illusions and which offer real hope.

Some of the world’s leading writers, artists, scientists, economists, and public intellectuals considered how we might free ourselves from the anxiety which pervades contemporary society, fulfill our promises and avoid temptation.
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The Vienna Humanities Festival is a project by Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen and Time to Talk.
In cooperation with: Falter, Open Society Foundations, Stadt Wien, Erste Stiftung, Akademie der Bildenden Künste Wien and Volkstheater.

Learn more about the Vienna Humanities Festival here: https://www.humanitiesfestival.at