How not to fear AI?

Yesterday I talked about this at TEDx ZHAW Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften.

The journey started already circa two years ago, when I began investigating, and putting into words and talks, how a technically grounded understanding of AI can help mitigate unwarranted fears. KCF – WERTE ORIENTIERT FÜHREN 2023 in Berlin was a kick-off, after which many requests reached me to extend this material and make it available to larger audiences. My sabbatical added depth (links in the comments). When Tilman Slembeck asked in January if I wanted to join TEDxZHAW “Merging Worlds” as a speaker, I felt ready.

Little did I know how much preparation still awaited me. I easily invested more than one order of magnitude more effort here than in any other talk I ever prepared. As the TED format asks for a different style than I usually do (shorter, story-focussed, less slides, speaker-centered), I had to change my whole approach to creating and then practicing a talk. I felt like a boxer who had prepared intensely for months for this one fight: I created 12 iterations of slides; wrote a script for the talk for the first time in my life; rehearsed and updated it every free minute for the last two weeks; gave premature versions of the talk to my colleagues at least once a day. Thanks to this preparation, we now have a full script of the talk available. I want to share it here with you below (link in the comments; video will come soon).

Shout-out to Tilman and the ZHAW School of Management and Law for making this possible, my coaches Mark Alder and David Taylor, team-mate Anian Schreiber and other speakers Nadina Mueller, Markus Hackenfort, Ph.D, and Martina Rebekka Spiess, and the ZHAW Centre for Artificial Intelligence (CAI) for creating such a great environment for curating such thoughts and ideas.

Link to the full article on github.