By Christian Zimmermann.

What might be a résumé?

The speakers provided various valuable insights and knowledge about the current main topics within the digital movement. This ranged from presentations of promising new business models to some disillusioning moments when it came to topics like AI (Artificial Intelligent) or VR (Virtual Reality) which are currently pictured in a much more SciFi way by the mainstream media than the current technical possibilities actually can provide us.

the presented knowledge in general, but the resulting current and future potential effects of the so-called “digitalization” on each individual person, living and working within this environment, had the biggest impact on my thinking in the course of the week. The number of possibilities is growing at an accelerated at mind-blowing speed. Are we ready to enter this game and play it in an adequate manner as digital citizens?

 

Mindset shift of young talents #transparency #fairness #sharing #success

The next generation of young talents seems to be more purpose driven and is more likely to combine personal interests with their career. Since corporates are claiming for high presence and commitment of their employees in exchange, they want to get something in return: trust in their abilities, freedom of time management and adequate respect for the work they do.

Today in general, all the ideas generated by individual employees automatically belong to the company and the employees do not get a fair share of the success even if the idea might become the next unicorn. These inputs are hard to be measured and quantified and therefore nowadays not mentioned in the employment contracts as mutual factors of success.

 

 

Supercomputers that control our minds #AI #QuantumSteps

As already mentioned in several previous blog posts of our students, the term AI (Artificial Intelligence) is presented today in a slightly distorted way. In order to define if a machine is an AI, one has to primarily define what an AI and the two underlying terms Artificial and Intelligence actually are. Potential definitions could be: An AI is a transformation process of data which is no acting according to strict rules defined by the programmer. AI does not deal with rule-based models but with data-driven models which are self-learning. AI is the any function. One thing seems certain though: There are no supercomputers yet, which will take over the world due to an intelligence that is exponentially increasing and exceeding the human brain in a foreseeable future. Unless we would like to be dictated by computer calculations – in order to not be responsible to make decisions – and this is up to us.

Current programs that show a sort of “weak AI” are still coded and generated by human brains. The structure and its limits are defined by humans and therefore as well biased by them. Even if computers will not provide us with a „Real AI“ – or show the behavior of it in the near future, their influence on our daily lifes will be enormous due to the increase of computational power.

Another, literal „quantum leap” could be the idea of quantum computing – which could possibly lead to a major change of processing power and the way we have to think and code computer programs. Today processors are working based on the concept of electrical impulses. On or off. 1 or 0. Within the field of quantum mechanics – scientists found out that electrons do not only show the behavior of a particle but as well the one of a wave at the same time. Depending on the way you measure it you detect either the solid or the wave state. Therefore they can actually be not only 0 and 1 but as well anything in-between. Thus information can be transferred much faster and more specific – what will lead to an increase of several powers of the processing capacity compared to today’s computers.

Such computers will be able to solve mathematical problems that humans could not even dream of to solve. The way we think of programming and coding will have to change completely and adjust to the new possibilities. For todays applied encryption methods, this means that a computer can crack passwords, which currently count as safe, within minutes or even seconds. Though to be scared of a total lack of security in this context is misplaced, as this is just the next level of the race between encryption and decryption. However, a discussion about how to handle such possibilities in the future would help to avoid bad surprises. 

Between Prediction and artificial reality #Not so human yet #think

New research fields are currently popping up as information technologies seem to provide many possible solutions for key problems within our society. Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence or Augmented Reality are just three of the currently most mentioned ones. Many of them show for sure a great potential to improve our life on earth but mass media is mostly overrating the current possibilities. A physical robot or chatbot that is interacting as a human person is still fiction. There exists no computer program yet which passed the Turing test. A test which should serve as verification if a machine shows real artificial intelligence by imitating human behavior in a way that actual humans can’t distinguish if they are interacting with a human or a machine. Find more information here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wLqsRLvV-c