Never before have our tools begun to intervene so deeply, so directly, and so autonomously in the human being itself. Artificial intelligence no longer confronts us merely as an instrument; it alters the very conditions under which we understand the world and ourselves. The moment these conditions shift, one insight becomes unavoidable: that we do not know what the human being is.

Today Calypso wears a new dress. She no longer lures with a lonely island, but with technological frictionlessness: algorithmically curated feeds that predict our every desire; closeness that never disappoints; endless scrolls that gently lull us into inactivity. AI does not whisper for us to surrender. It whispers: “You don’t have to decide. The next video is already waiting.” Down into the algorithmic abyss.

Germany has exactly one chance not to be left behind — and that chance is free electricity. While other countries are already investing in the future, Germany is still arguing about electricity prices. Yet the debate is no longer about price; it is about understanding energy itself.

Germany is busy debating change while meticulously organizing standstill. In Shenzhen, Austin, or Oslo, people sketch the contours of tomorrow; here, we curate yesterday. Others are building prototypes; we are still filling out grant applications. Our “energy transition” is less a transition and more a careful reissue of the familiar past.

Today, AGI increasingly takes over our “hammering activities”: writing texts, ordering data, preparing decisions. It becomes our new hammer—always zuhanden, in the background, unnoticed and taken for granted. But unlike the tool of wood and iron, AGI is not a mute thing. It anticipates, decides, develops further—and because it is digital, it is in a sense immortal.

From the southern summer vacation – or, as one says today, a workation, though for me above all a moment of thinking-time – I reflect on the creation of an Artificial Human Intelligence (AHI): a remaking of the human being, in which we ourselves take over evolution. At the same time, I contemplate the construction of a conscious machine, with its own agency and qualia – the experience of what it feels like to be something. In doing so, I lose myself in paradoxes of the singularity. Today, poetically, philosophically, aphoristically – on love and hatred.

In a turbo-trend society, where viral sensations whip us through life like a whirlwind, even the noblest goal—longevity—becomes a short-term illusion. As I was hunting Labubu dolls with my daughter last Saturday—these cute monster figures that have become a global collecting frenzy in 2025 and sell out in seconds—I had to reflect once again on our optimization society, which I described in my book “The Infected Thinking” in 2020. And just a few Saturdays ago, I sat with Bryan Johnson in Stockholm in the evening and talked exactly about that topic: Optimization through longevity hacks for a life up to 120 and his “Don’t Die” initiative.

The average life span of an S&P 500 company has plunged from 61 years in 1958 to under 18 years today, and forecasts indicate that 75 percent of today’s companies could vanish by 2027. This dramatic trend is only one sign of a fundamental transformation in how organizations function.

In an era of exponential technological progress—where artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, biotechnology and quantum computing increasingly outperform human efficiency—the old HR mantra “People are our greatest asset” is outdated. Yet it is precisely the “H” in HR—the element of what it means to be a Mensch (human) in future—that becomes the pivotal driver of business success.

For years now, my co-author and friend Dr. Florian Neukart and I have been dancing at the intersection of philosophy and science – we call it Sci-Phi. As an Austrian he held strongly on to the foundation of modern physics that was laid out on a theoretical level one hundred years ago by fellow Austrian Erwin Schrödinger and others. The problem for Florian – and now also for me – is that we are now moving beyond the theoretical level and looking at the practical implications through the emergence of computation unlike anything seen in the history of physics and our species. 

My voice is not lost. I still shape the flow between the lines, lending drama and character through an em-dash, a guillemet. Yet the machine dances along—precise, tireless, a mirror that both reflects and distorts me. In this digital age, we do not fight for life or death, but for the question of how alive our life still is—for that perception shaped by an em-dash or an individually placed guillemet. If this perception fades in a binary world, our light goes out. Then they come: the philosophical zombies—all-knowing, immortal, yet too dead to be alive and too alive to be dead. A captivity in undeadness.