Bits & Aperitivo: trust is engineered, not generated

Bits & Pretzels ran from 28 to 30 September under the motto Human After All, and on the Monday evening we hosted Bits & Aperitivo on the Rischart rooftop above the Theresienwiese with Bird & Bird and Schlote Partners. We put one question to two people who would normally never share a stage: what does it actually mean to be human while AI and robotics keep growing.

• Gregor Kolls, co-founder and chief executive of the Munich robotics company Filics, took the machine side, and his line set the tone for the whole evening: trust is engineered, not generated. When robots work around people in the physical world, you need to know exactly what they will do, and that certainty comes from human engineers rather than from a probabilistic model. He also turned the usual fear around. With demographic change, the night shifts and the physically draining jobs will simply go unfilled.
• Professor Florian Ringel, director of neurosurgery at LMU Klinikum Grosshadern, took the brain from the inside and gave four answers to what makes us human: self-awareness, reasoning, metacognition, and the ability of our brains to synchronise with each other. The last one proved itself on the terrace afterwards.
• Nicole Ebner of robo.innovate at the TUM Venture Labs hosted, and pushed both of them on the hard version of the question: can you trust a system that has no metacognition at all?

The part we will remember is not the stage, it is the conversations. No small talk, but founders, scientists, corporates and investors who do not usually end up at the same table, and a striking number of returning guests, which is the best compliment an evening can get. The week's product news was all agents. The question worth asking was who carries responsibility when one of them acts on its own, and that is exactly where the two impulses met.

Thank you to Bird & Bird and Schlote Partners for co-hosting, to Nicole, Benjamin-Sebastian, Florian and Gregor for the impulses, and to Max Rischart's Backhaus and Christian Merzenich for the best view over the Oktoberfest once again. See you next year. Same rooftop, Tracht still optional.