Collaboration is considered something that is rational and intended: collaborative partners share certain interests and agree about the best way to realize their goals. But what about automated processes?
The conference Global Cooperation in the 21st Century, hosted by the Käte Hamburger Kolleg, analyzes automatic, unconscious, and unwanted collaborations that take place behind the backs of those involved. Beside the market mechanisms, they include automated actions carried out by robots and programs, including high speed trading on the stock markets, along with actions taken while asleep, traumas and psychopathologies of everyday life, and finally things that take place due to ›providence‹ and predestination. Can, as Bernard Mandeville’s fable of the bees was intended to show, private vices become public benefits?
World society, a world of unintended consequences, is driven by such forces. This conference, with contributions from various disciplines, art history and theater studies, economics, psychoanalysis and computer sciences, will explore this range of questions.
