Künstliche Intelligenz und der Sinn des Lebens Ein Essay

A notably unilateral view on massively fascinating topics as artificial intelligence, the peril in the pursuit of such and the involvement of the, of course, male, capitalist programmer.

(A note for non german speakers: We do differ between genders in words, so the author refusing to use the proper terms including female computer scientists as well already did not sit right with me - female computer scientist in training speaking. We do exist. And we did in 2020 already, too.)

Precht's writing style might work for some, less for others, to me in this essay it was more tiresome than usual. He also shows pretty clearly what kind of prejudices he has towards the people "programming AI" (choice of words already showing how much he is missing here), while simultaneously revealing his lack of knowledge about quite a few of the topics he touches. It seems as if, while highlighting his concern and relying on antique ideas without taking their historical context into consideration, the author gets lost in the various and enormously different concepts of modern computer science. He seems to lack fundamental understanding of some of these sub-areas he tries to utilise to undermine his point of view.

While he does raise valid questions, provides a number of thought-provoking impulses and does this in that unsurprisingly very polemic way of his (he strives to provoke and is known for that), his essay failed me both as a purely philosophical view on AI/KI as he does not provide the knowledge necessary to a reader new to the topic of AI who reads this for the philosophical insight only, as well as the IT focused variant, due to the obvious lack of knowledge on the subject.

2 and a bit stars for raising good questions, the lack of the rest for failing to back them up properly and presenting his concerns in a manner that shows only one side of a coin without even considering the beneficial possibilities of a whole concept.