You Are Not Your Data

Does AI Give You Wings?

If so, only one. With one wing, nobody flies.

Volker Viechtbauer knows the line about the wings from the inside: for almost three decades he worked at Red Bull, for many years responsible for legal affairs and human resources. AI, he says, really does raise the floor – it writes, calculates, summarizes, faster than any of us. But the second wing – checking, choosing, taking responsibility – the human being himself must move. This book is about that second wing. 

With Viktor Frankl he asks the question behind the dispute over jobs and prosperity: what is left of me when a machine can do more and more of what I was proud of? From the sleep tracker that becomes the judge of one’s own night to Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, who wants to relieve people of the burden of freedom, he explores the seduction of a life in which everything is rated and more and more is decided for us. He does not exempt his own way of working: this book was written with AI – “against AI and with the help of AI” – and at the end the machine answers the book. 

His alternative is called self-forgetfulness: not giving oneself up, but turning toward a task, a person, a cause. Viktor Frankl, who learned in Auschwitz what holds a human being when everything has been taken from him, set the example. 

A personal, combative essay by Volker Viechtbauer on performance and trust, the comfort of ready-made answers and the courage to remain imperfect.