Digital Salon | Florian Rötzer in conversation with Raùl Rojas

With Raùl Rojas we want to talk about how artificial intelligence and autonomous robots will change our working and living environment, where it will become dangerous and how humans can adapt to the new roommates.

How personal will autonomous vehicles, smart homes, care, play or sex robots become? Should limits be placed on development? Will we eventually become slaves to the intelligent beings we create? We are just at the transition from the written culture to the binary culture of algorithms. Will the intellectuals and scholars of written culture, who drove enlightenment, science, and social change, be replaced by the code and algorithm virtuosos of binary culture? In an increasingly digitalized world, reality is more and more determined by codes and algorithms. Those who do not understand them are in danger of becoming the new layer of illiterates.

Guest in the Digital Salon is Prof. Dr. Dr. Raùl Rojas is one of the best-known German scientists for artificial intelligence, robotics and neural networks and taught and researched at the Institute of Computer Science at the FU Berlin until 2019. Rojas was born in Mexico City and graduated from FU Berlin under Prof. Dr. Ernst Altvater with his research on Karl Marx's Capital (Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie). In parallel, he studied mathematics and computer science and taught Artificial Intelligence since 1994.

Raùl Rojas has become known with the development of autonomous vehicles (Spirit of Berlin) and the development of autonomous robots. His team won first place with the FU Fighters at the RoboCup World Championship in 2005 and 2004, among others. The RoboCup was created with the ambitious goal of defeating the human world champion with a robot team by 2050. Soccer is interesting because embodied robots must perceive and act collectively in a dynamic environment in real time. Rojas has also worked extensively on the history of computers (The Computing Machines of Konrad Zuse, 1998, The First Computers, 2000, Encyclopedia of Computers and Computer History, 2001). Along the way, he has worked on cosmology (Cosmology: Past and Future of the Universe, 2018) and soccer theory (The Depth of Space, 2018), and is currently writing a column in the major Mexican newspaper El Universal about the 100 books that changed the world.