Every era has its fears. Attentive readers of the news could easily come to the conclusion that we are living in the worst of times, given all the political and technological developments that cannot help but lead to the collapse of our civilization. Climate change, war in Ukraine and Israel, sabre-rattling in China, artificial intelligence that is on its way to enslaving us, killing us and making us unemployed, today’s generations who don’t want to work, are stupefied in front of their cell phones and have their brains softened by influencers on Tik Tok.
In past scares, the purpose of building the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco was questioned, elevator sickness was warned against, the Boston subway tunnel was decried as unwanted, the umbrella as un-British and too “French”, and, of course, vaccinations as against the nature of God. Today, we mostly just smile at these fears, because these technologies or buildings have become a natural part of our lives.
The Pessimists Archive repeatedly finds gems from the past in which warnings were issued about the dangers of technologies such as the bicycle, the airplane, the mirror, the stethoscope or the teddy bear, and which are astonishingly similar in tone and arguments to the fears of current technologies and developments. One type of person has always appeared and continues to appear who earns a living from this: the moral entrepreneur. They earn their living and their reputation by warning against new technologies. If we were not to regulate them and return to nature, then civilization as we know it would come to an end. Richard David Precht and Anders Indset are prime examples of such moral entrepreneurs.
The danger lies not so much in the technologies or developments they warn against, but in the negative and fearful Leitkultur they create and with which societies remove themselves from international competition.
What the Pessimists Archive or interested parties previously had to laboriously gather from old newspapers in order to find comparisons and thus expose the ridiculousness at the same time can now be automated thanks to a currently frightening technology – artificial intelligence.
News Déjà Vu aims to match today’s news items with similar-sounding ones from the past. This AI-based service finds the news twin, so to speak, by first hiding all named persons, places or organizations. The AI language model, which has been trained to capture semantic similarity, then maps each news article to a vector. For a given modern news article, the closest historical article in this vector space is then searched for and returned.
A news report today about the fear that AI will destroy many jobs is juxtaposed with similar fears from the past about robots or computers. Or the fear that Tik Tok would make people stupid is placed alongside similar statements about television, radio, comics, books or theater from the past.
The creators behind News Déjà Vu aim to make this AI-based search tool more accessible to a wider audience with a simple user interface.
Incidentally, many sometimes absurd examples of such past, present and future fears can be found in my book published in 2021 book Future Angst: Wie wir von Innovationsvorreitern zu Innovationsnachzüglern wurden und wie wir die German Angst überwinden.
FUTURE ANGST
Welche aktuellen Ängste prägen uns? Mit welchen Ängsten waren die Menschen in der Vergangenheit konfrontiert, als es die heutigen Technologien noch nicht gab? Warum mischen wir heute im Wettbewerb der Kulturen um neue Technologien nicht ganz vorne mit? Welche Maßnahmen müssen wir ergreifen, um neue Technologien nicht als etwas Beängstigendes und Feindseliges zu betrachten, sondern als ein Mittel zur Lösung der großen Probleme der Menschheit? Innovationsexperte Dr. Mario Herger stellt in „Future Angst“ die entscheidenden Fragen in Bezug auf Technologie und Fortschritt und zeigt professionelle und zukunftsweisende Lösungen auf. Mit seinem Appell „Design the Future“ bietet Herger einen unkonventionellen und transformativen Ansatz für ein neues, human geprägtes Mindset.