TECHNOLOGY & POSSIBILITY

The Shell at Your Ear

Palantir wants to create a new ocean. I’d rather hold up the shell and listen to what’s already there.

BY MAX THINIUS

“Behold,” declares the tech bro, “we have created a new mind!” — “Behold,” I reply, holding a seashell up to his ear, “I have created a new ocean.” That’s how Max Leibman put it on Mastodon. He couldn’t have said it better.

Two pieces of news have been occupying my thoughts lately. The first comes from Silicon Valley: Palantir has published a 22-point manifesto calling for, among other things, the reinstatement of the military draft. The second comes from Germany: 65 percent of German industrial companies are already deploying AI in active production processes — more than the global average.

Both are being sold as news from the future. Both are, in fact, dispatches from the past.

We’re currently experiencing a strange, collective hysteria. An entire industry of consultants, futurists, and LinkedIn prophets has made it their mission to constantly tell us we’re deficient. The human being, according to the tenor, is an obsolete model, faulty software desperately in need of an update. If we don’t immediately start “reinventing ourselves,” “unlearning” our everyday knowledge, and optimizing our “skill stacks,” we’ll be swept away by the wave of history.

(…) Perhaps today it should be “Made from Germany”—with the intent to create something trustworthy, valuable for the world. Something that ensures not just our own but also global quality of life and economic vitality. In this way, Germany could again be perceived as the world’s most stable country, a point of orientation. That would likely lead to both economic and political influence. (…)

Full interview with Deutschlandfunk Kultur & Me on Radio linked inside.

We also need new guiding principles to manage these possibilities responsibly. Building on the new understanding of sustainability, these are the SDGs of the digital age:

Could coffee be the answer to our productivity crisis? In a way, yes.