Tim Cole

Wild Wild Web - What the history of the Wild West teaches us about the future of the digital society.

The discussion about how to break the supremacy of the GAFA monopolies – Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple – and establish a functioning digital ethics system is long overdue. After all, we don’t want to live in the Wild West – we can watch it in the cinema.

• Digital robber barons and the second age of gold leaf
• GAFA and how she sees the world
• Digital commons and digital sin eaters
• We are the Web!
• 10 things we can learn from the Wild West

Digital Transformation

The next 5 to 10 years will decide who will be the digital winners and who will be the losers.

The purpose of digital transformation is to improve the process efficiency of business activities.

• Digital transformation is the further development of isolated solutions for company-wide networking to support all value-adding company activities in order to reduce process costs.
• The electronic coordination and control of all business activities in the final stage of development enables cost-effective, but above all customer-oriented corporate management.
• The digital transformation is not a universal hat that can be put over every company, but an individual, complex system that creates the transparency to mitigate or eliminate company-specific weaknesses, but supports and emphasizes the strengths and uses them even more effectively.

Intelligence of the future: How computers learn to think for us

Man is the most intelligent being in the world, but his intelligence is the result of an evolutionary process that has lasted thousands of years and is far from over. What does the future of intelligence look like and how intelligent will our future be? Im Cole, author of the book “Digital Enlightenment – Why the Internet Makes Us Smarter” (Hanser-Verlag) explains in his lecture how intelligence arises, what other forms of intelligence are possible and gives an insight into the current state of computer research, which shortly is on the verge of a breakthrough to “learning-capable” systems, so-called “cognitive computers”.

In doing so, he takes away his viewers’ fear of the typical horror stories from the field of science fiction: the computer will not enslave people; it will help him to solve complex intellectual tasks better than is possible today with the help of “Intelligence 1.0”. Such systems will revolutionize cancer research, prevent economic catastrophes like the recent banking crisis and allow traffic to flow more smoothly on our roads.

The fact that computers can become mentally active for humans is a similarly revolutionary step as the automation of production (quantity and quality of work), the “physical superiority” of machines (aircraft, weapons…) and the invention of new materials and active ingredients (plastics , medicines…), which were also first invented by humans so that they are useful to humans. According to Cole, what is useful for people should also be done. With the help of artificial intelligence that complements and augments human intelligence, we will become better human beings ourselves, with the ability to solve problems that were previously far beyond our (thinking) abilities.