Art and Science Minister Markus Blume invited media people to a small New Year’s reception this week. The location chosen, the Deutsches Museum, fitted in perfectly with the theme of the evening: “Home and High-Tech”. After all, both – the place and the saying (an upcycling of Stoiber’s “Laptop & Lederhose”) – are classics that have only been partially renovated so far.
What Blume describes in his short speech as the all-determining challenge for politics and the media in 2023 is just as coherent: “Who still guarantees reason and truth in the age of artificial intelligence?”
On an evening when colorful cocktails and wine are served in a nice museum bar like the “Frau im Mond” to politicians, press people and some mad professors (such as the knowledgeable curators of the space department in the Deutsches Museum), there are of course less and less in the medium term place for reason. But more for the truth that lies in wine. And so they told each other – strictly confidential and not intended for publication, of course – all sorts of farces from the remainders of the analogue world. About the background to the end of the Gasteig redevelopment, about the wafting future of the Biotopia project and about the men who not so long ago landed on the moon by hand control.
A new colleague is listening in
Only one stands silent, cute and barely higher than the minister’s knees, with wide eyes and wide open ears between the swaggerers and swaggerers: a small robot. He wobbled here as a guest from Bavaria’s high-tech training center TU Munich. Curiously, he rocks his little head, and because his programming wants it that way, as a lifelike listener, he keeps changing his standing and free leg, the direction of his gaze and how he holds his hands. Let’s call him Robbie to protect his personality. But he’s still closed.
But these days, his human kindergarten uncle is feeding him Chat GPT, which is the artificial intelligence (AI) that Blume just alluded to in his speech. Then Robbie will soon be able to provide better information and help. With all the seminar papers that he is currently writing at the TU and other Bavarian universities, with the speeches that the minister will be giving in the next few weeks. And of course, also with the articles that this newspaper publishes. That’s not nice? Well, maybe yes, if the columns here finally become less sad and really funny.