Tag: technology

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Passing barriers

In quantum physics the real trick is not the rebound of electrons like the rebound of droplets, but the passing of electrons of an insulating barrier. The experiment of the ”Josephson junction” has set a precedent to research the surprising macro-effect of “quantum tunnelling”. The 2025 Nobel Prize has been awarded to Clarke, Devoret and Martinis who observed these effects on a macroscopic scale. The applications in the most advanced quantum computers of today shows the enormous potential of this demonstration in pushing computing speed boundaries. The international competition to develop such, ever faster computers, based on quantum physics, is running on high development speed. In combination with the artificial intelligence (AI) developments, these types of combined machines are likely to outpace the development of human-based intelligence. It becomes even more important to define the limits for those machines by us. Subsequently, we shall have to make sure that such combined machines stick to the rules, we define(d).

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Deus ex machina

The term “deus ex machina” used to be applied more in its figurative meaning. With the rise of digital tools like chatbots, facilitated and enhanced through AI, God is speaking to us not only in multiple languages, but also from our pockets through our smartphones and headsets. This is a rather recent form of “deus ex machina”, which we did not expect some years ago. The bible as e-book or pdf-file has been around for some decades, but only more recently we can enter conversations with God through chatbots as another version of “deus ex machina “ about almost everything (and pay for it via digital credit card). Programming of such an AI-tool is easily achieved. AI will prepare a weekly or daily sermon or prayer for you, following your predilections of your favourite quotes of the bible. An interesting twist to the programming is to use authorized as well as unauthorized translations of the bible across several centuries.
Another interesting enlargement of the input data base is the inclusion of interpretations and discussions not only within your own religious community, but beyond. Maybe the discussion of several different religious chatbots with each other could prevent aggressions due to differences in basic beliefs. These “dei ex machina” might further our understanding of what makes us humans different from machines and machine-based solutions of human conflicts.
As genetic clones of ourselves have become already technically more feasible, our digital alter-egos (the comprehensive collection of traces in the internet and digital images, plus social scoring) help to empower those “dei ex machina”.
This kind of “Brave New World” asks us to be rather brave ourselves.
(Image: interior St Denis Basilique Cathedral Paris 2024)

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Chatbot Me

Chatbots are helpful to allow queries to larger data sets like the blog entries here. So here is a try of a Chatbot to query all entries on AI using ChatGPT to create a Chatbot that uses and references it source from www.schoemann.org/tag/ai and the AI reader in pdf-format.
Please send me an email if the hallucinations of this Chatbot 1.0 on AI from a social science perspective are giving strange results. I’ll get back to you. Please use at your own risk as I cannot guarantee for all answers. The usual disclaimer applies here.

ChatGPT proposed the following set of Questions and Answers on the blog for an entry into the chat: Example Q&A with the chatbot

Q: What are the social science concerns with AI?
A: Bias in results, job shifts, democracy risks, privacy, and new inequalities.

Q: What does the text say about reinforcement learning?
A: It’s seen as the next step for AI: focusing on learning and reasoning, not just predicting text. It also uses fewer resources.

Q: How are robots described in the document?
A: Robots are mostly assistants. They can follow people or carry small items, but more complex tasks need sensors and AI training.

Q: What about biased results?
A: Studies can be misleading if control groups are flawed. AI faces the same challenge — social scientists warn: “handle with care”.

Q: What is Schoemann’s blog view on AI?
A: He links AI to energy use, fairness, and its role in the “all-electric society” — stressing efficiency and responsibility.

More on the chatbot (in testing phase) and the Link to the coding help received from ChatGPT on this mini-test-project :
https://chatgpt.com/share/68c1d160-0cc0-8003-bf04-991b9e7c3b24

 

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Mind Map Me

AI tools are great to assist learners in the task to get more structure into larger documents or books. It is up to the teachers or lecturers to use the tools themselves to pre-structure content they want other persons to learn. Mind maps are useful to summarise larger content and offer a tree-like structure to a text moving from the general to more specific content and then into details by at the same time not loosing sight of the overall structure of the content. Basics can be provided by Google’s NotebookLM and you may rework this basic structure yourself linking the mind map to the detailed content. Learning may start with a comprehensive mind map at the beginning to move on to details. Alternative versions of a mind map are equally feasible to come up with new combinations of subjects. This can be done using the tags of the blog entries in addition to the categories and fast search keywords.
It is a fascinating way to mind map yourself based on longer texts written by yourself. This clarifies a bit what potential readers or learners are likely to retain from reading your document(s) or blog entries.
Its worth trying, as others will most likely use these tools from now onwards anyway, whether we like it or not.
Image: Google NotebookLM Mind Map of my AI blog entries 2025-9-9.

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Own AI related entries

The digital drafting of blog posts facilitates the publishing of volumes based on a selection of entries. Pdf-files, or EPUB formats are quite common. The choice of a flipbook is more suitable for larger screens of tablets or notebooks. It also serves as a rapid stock taking of entries and missing topics to cover a broader field. In some fields AI is not yet popular, for example in agentic home applications, whereas in other fields text, translation or image production AI has grown into a threat to professional fields. Even computer languages are a major field of application with substantial negative employment effects.
Hence, enjoy the latest comments on AI towards the end of my latest Flipbook.
Just click here.

ChatGPT provides a summary of my AI-reader as follows:

From the uploaded text AI from a Social Science Perspective (Dr. Klaus Schoemann), social science concerns with AI focus on potentials and limitations of how AI interacts with society:

  • Labour and employment: AI impacts jobs, but adjustment processes are slow. For example, there’s a shortage of engineers and care workers, while robots are still limited to simple assistant tasks. This raises concerns about who benefits and who is left behind.
  • Bias and fairness: The book highlights issues of biased results in research and decision-making. When AI systems rely on incomplete or selective samples, results can be misleading — a challenge also familiar to social scientists.
  • Democracy and accountability: Journalists and scientists are framed as part of a “checks and balances” system. AI adds complexity here, as the fast spread of information without accountability can weaken democratic processes.
  • Human–machine relations: Topics like intimacy, housing, and memory are re-thought in the context of AI and digitalization, raising questions about privacy, social norms, and cultural heritage.
  • War and security: AI-driven technologies like drones change the nature of warfare, raising ethical and political questions.

On his blog, Schoemann also stresses the energy and resource costs of large AI models and how reinforcement learning offers a more efficient alternative. He warns that AI should be understood not just technically, but as part of an “all-electric society” where social sciences help assess risks, inequalities, and long-term consequences.

👉 In short: AI raises social science concerns about equity, bias, democracy, labour, cultural shifts, and global risks.

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AI employment effects

The first robust empirical evidence about employment effects of AI in the USA has been published by the Stanford Digital Economy Lab by  Chen, Chandar and Brynjolfsson (2025). A previous paper by Wang and Wang (2025) highlighted the comparative advantage of persons who use AI in their work compared to others and the authors coined the term “learning by using technology”.  The prediction of the model was that there might be job losses of more than 20% in the long run and half of this already in the first 5 years of the introduction of the technology. The Stanford economists have estimated with real world data these effects in the USA and find quite surprisingly that the negative employment effects of AI have the strongest impact on young labor market entrants with few years of labor market experience. Middle-aged and more senior employees seem to benefit from “tacit knowledge” about the work, which is more difficult to replace with AI, at least for the time being of the early days of AI. This evidence is based on recent payroll data from the largest payroll processing firm “ADP” in the USA which has firms overrepresented from the manufacturing and services industries as reported in another paper  (Firm size maybe another source of bias).  However, the effect that youth 22-25 years of age suffered the most calls into question the common belief that older workers are more likely to suffer the consequences as during in the rise of the digital economy around the year 2000. (AI Image created with Canva)

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Vacation or Workation

Vacation or Workation, that is the question. Remote work and outsourcing of work have  created the opportunity for more people to work from distant places. Logging into the firm’s or the administration’s secured intranet enabled to work from where you prefer to work rather than on the premises of the firm. After the technological shift to enable secure remote work, the acceptability of remote work is a societal issue. Whereas bosses worked or had to work while on travel for many decades, the same has become feasible due to reduced costs for many other employees as well. The Covid-19 pandemic has forced another shift in the need to accept and advance remote work as well. Taken together the option of a “workation” instead of a vacation became equally more feasible. The borderline between remote work, “workation” and vacation has become more and more blurred. It remains to be seen, whether these options enhance an outsourcing trend by firms or whether  more “back-sourcing” or “in-sourcing” will be the consequence.
Employers with their associations and employees with their trade union representatives have a need to include such topics in their bargaining agenda in addition to pay, health and safety, as well as working time adaptations.
(Image created with Canva 2025-9)

 

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Electrifying Jobs

The transition to the “all electric society” necessitates to prepare the labor force for the upcoming challenge. The knowledge about electricity and electric appliances constitutes the basics of the knowledge base of the future. This goes far beyond the basics of physics and electrical engineering. There many processes like sharing of electric infrastructure in households, cities, in and beyond countries that have to be delt with. Investment calculations and legal issues to address the different risks involved are another area to cover in the process to prepare society for the “all electric society”.
However, the skills of professions with more direct links to the fossil fuel based technologies have a role in the phasing out of the heavy reliance on fossil fuels. Reverse engineering of such engines and heating will need people still knowledgeable of the past, when younger generations set their focus primarily on professions with links to electricity. Even using a solar powered heat pump in a home requires pipes to the existing network of radiators, for example. This will most likely be a gradual shift of the job structure and occupational requirements over at least a decade, but the shift has started already. Some might argue we need a well functioning “transitional labour market”, labour market policies and social security system for this to happen smoothly.

 

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AI 2nd round effects

The most popular topic currently is AI.
Most writers, assisted by some form of AI, will deal with the 1st round effects of AI. These consist in the immediate consequence of the use of AI in office work, medical and military applications, music and all producing or creative industries. As an economist you take the input – output matrix of the economy (OECD countries) and take AI as an additional dimension of this I/O matrix, for example. The result is an AI-augmented model of the economy. This 3-dimensional cubic view of the economy asks to reflect on the potential short-term and medium-term impact of AI.
Let’s take the example of translation and editing services. AI will in the short-term or the 1st round effects make it easier to offer mechanical translations with fast turnaround. Most likely, this will lead to less translators needed for routine translations of longer texts, which would otherwise be a very costly endeavour. The 2nd round effects, however, will make the expert knowledge of translators of texts, where every word counts, more necessary in order to provide the best version of a translation targeted on specific audiences.
In the legal domain, for example, the precision of words is primordial and errors can be very costly. Hence, the 2nd round effects of AI in this field will increase the demand for high quality translation services more than before the use of AI. The important shift consists in these 2nd round effects of AI, which give a push to multilingual societies as just one medium-term outcome.
Please use AI to read (listen) to this paragraph in your native language or even dialect using your favourite AI-tool.

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Ohm … Ohm

In the 21st century most people will interpret “Ohm … Ohm” as the exhalation in yoga  (Hatha yoga). Therefore, take a deep breath, hold it for a while (twice as long) and then exhale (thrice as long), for example. Now you are perfectly set up to read about Georg Simon Ohm (1789 – 1854), the physicist after whom Ohm’s law was named. In the “All electric society” Ohm’s law still plays a fundamental role for all households. The understanding of electric circuits is quite easy, just apply the basic relationship of Ohm’s law. In a resistor the current and voltage are proportional. The sign (SI) for resistance (R in physics) of a conductor is the Greek letter Ω. The proportionality is expressed as R = V/I where V is the Voltage and I the current through the conductor. The units are Ω, Volt V, Ampere A. All you need to know additionally is the calculation of the power P in Watt W where P = V x I for example. If you want or need to dig deeper into your home electricity just study a bit of electrical technology on the basics.
In our homes, apartments or offices we can apply this 200 years old knowledge to guide the safety and energy consumption of our electric installations. Maybe with the help of a spreadsheet programme like excel etc.