The mood in the country is bad, I have just heard from friends, and there are many reasons why exactly. However, one of the reasons is our success over the last few decades, which has made us overconfident. I notice this again and again in conversations in intimate company or on stage, where there is inevitably someone who says “we are well positioned”, “we are better than , or “they would never be able to do that” or “they first have to prove that…“.

Six years ago, an appearance by the then VW boss Matthias Müller made the rounds when he said that we should “leave the church in the village” as far as Tesla was concerned and gave all sorts of reasons why Tesla should not be taken seriously. These statements have not aged very well, as we now have to worry about VW, which is experiencing sales difficulties and production problems with its electric cars.

These statements fall in line with many others, such as in this interview, where, for example, German manufacturers are said to be “right at the forefront” of self-driving technologies. Such statements do Germany a disservice. They lull us into a sense of security, they lull us into a false sense of urgency. Because I have discussed in detail in several blogs how to classify what Mercedes or BMW have to offer, such as turquoise lights, Drive Pilot or Intelligent Park Pilot. This is the better candle, while others are developing the light bulb.

The focus is on what you know, what you are familiar with, where you have expertise and are proud of it. It is easy to overlook the fact that you are only working on the pedestal, but not on the statue on top of it, as I have broken down in this article. And sometimes you don’t even know it. This dangerous mixture of arrogance and ignorance, or as they say in the USA, “agnorance“, is propagated by these very experts and the media.

Lullers and Delflectors

One example comes from Handelsblatt a few months ago, where the San Francisco-based correspondent spends the first 80 percent of his article on his experiences with Waymo’s driverless robotaxis reporting only on the (alleged) errors and problems, and only says at the very end that everything was actually great anyway. What does the average engineer think when she reads such an article and draws conclusions for her own efforts? “The Americans can’t do it either, and we don’t need to be afraid of them.” A disservice that makes us fall behind.

It’s worse when it’s described as “hype” and that the technology will never make it. The best recent example was ChatGPT and the Bavarian High School diploma. At the beginning of February 2023, ChatGPT 3/3.5 was presented with the Bavarian Abitur to see if it could pass it. The result was poor on BR24, ChatGPT failed to impress. How could it, because as BR24 reports,

“Confident appearance with complete cluelessness, nothing does ChatGPT better than that”, stated the technology philosopher Mads Pankow back in December. The technology journalist Eva Wolfangel, on the other hand, described ChatGPT as a “loud-mouthed blabbermouth” and a “habitual liar”

Three months later, things looked completely different. The new version ChatGPT 4.0 passed the Bavarian High School exam with flying colors in May 2023. While the company had previously been arrogant and proud that ChatGPT could not pass the Bavarian Abitur after all, it was rather meek in May. Even the initial smugness about the first results was inappropriate. It signaled in the authors’ tone that working with ChatGPT or other generative AIs was unproductive because of such shortcomings. The urgency was denied, AI was declared to be a hype that would probably soon go away. And so readers who believe these words lose time to get to grips with such a new technology and find their own areas of application. When ChatGPT was able to solve the Abitur after all, and with flying colors, there was suddenly fire under the roof. Why hadn’t they looked into it earlier? Oh yes, it was portrayed by experts and media people as temporary hype and a technology not to be taken seriously.

At the same time, there are surprisingly many engineers who explain in great detail why something can never, ever work. I gave an example of this in my book Future Angst, where a physics graduate at the Technical University of Munich spoke up after my presentation on the state of autonomous cars and explained with conviction:

I own a house in the mountains and it’s always snowed over in winter. I have to drive ten kilometers on a snow-covered road to get there. An autonomous car will never be able to do that.

That was in 2019, exactly 50 years after the first manned moon landing. It was a few days after the Voyager 2 probe had left our solar system and finally entered interstellar space. And this is by no means an isolated incident. Who doesn’t remember the exam questions at school and university, which usually take the form of “Find the value of x”? I can’t ever remember a task asking examinees to find all the reasons why something could never work. What happens here in Germany after these people leave the educational institutions and then make such statements in their professions?

Hysterics

In addition to the lullers and dissuaders, there are the hysterics, who appear in different forms. First of all, there are the moral entrepreneurs who earn their living and their reputation by warning against new technologies. If we do not regulate them and return to nature, then civilization as we know it is in danger of coming to an end. And for this, absolutely no compromises are to be made with the greedy engineers, who have no clue about morals and ethics, and we can only prevent this with radical measures. Richard David Precht and Anders Indset are prime examples of such people

Other hysterics come from the industries affected by the changes. The technologies they have been working on for decades and with which they have built up their reputation and expertise are now in danger of being consigned to the dustbin of history. And since many identify with their profession and technology expertise and base their identity on it, this is more than just a change in technology. You can see this clearly in the transition from combustion engines to electric cars. Petromasculinity is clearly coming to the fore.

Leitkultur?

Is this the new dominant culture here? Not the one of poets, thinkers and engineers that we are so proud of? It seems to be becoming increasingly clear where this is leading us. At the same time, a class of bureaucrats and politicians is in power that is making us less and less efficient. When I look at the examples of digital nonsense we have collected in the LinkedIn group Digital Doof DACH, it makes me shudder. You get the feeling that we don’t want to do anything anymore. We’ve simply given up.

I myself am made angry by such lullers and deflectors, as well as these hysterics. On the one hand, their agenda (like Matthias Müller) is to make themselves and their own company look good. The competition is ridiculed and talked down to, and they exaggerate themselves. On the other hand, if you’re after consultancy contracts or research funding, you’ll rub companies and management boards the wrong way and tell them how great they are and how they’re “right at the forefront”. The hysterics, in turn, are passed around from one talk show to the next because it’s a win-win-win situation for everyone involved. The moral entrepreneurs earn their money from it, the journalists beat their chests proudly because they have uncovered a grievance, and the politicians because they can roll up their sleeves and take action against this new change and regulate it to death.

Urgency is the order of the day, as we have lost touch with many new technologies. Several of the digital giants from the USA and China are individually worth many times more than all DAX companies combined. Digital companies, electronics, artificial intelligence, and now also in the country’s most important industry, the automotive sector, we are only a distant second when it comes to electric and autonomous cars.

If we allow skeptics, lullers and hysterics to take the lead in defining the dominant culture, then we deserve to be relegated. This attitude, which brought China more than 200 years of decline in the 18th century, is now threatening to be repeated for us in the 21st century.