How can people stay smart in a smart world? Risk researcher and author Gerd Gigerenzer deals with this question. The decisive question is what intentions are being pursued with the new technology, he explains in the ntv podcast “So techt Deutschland”.
If Gerd Gigerenzer has his way, not only machines have to become more intelligent, but also people. It has to click in the head “to understand what it means to live in a world that is permeated by algorithms,” explains the psychologist, successful author and, above all, internationally recognized risk researcher of his approach. People would have to understand where the algorithms can be useful and where it’s just “marketing hype or techno-religious fantasies”.
In his work “Click. How we keep control in a digital world and make the right decisions”, Gigerenzer deals with the topic of digitization and the question of how people can also remain smart in a smart world. People have to recognize who or what is behind new technologies, who wants to manipulate and who wants to monitor.
However, Gigerenzer does not want to be seen as a technology critic. Technology is neither good nor bad, he says. One has to ask what the intentions are: in China, surveillance is open, in the western world it is hidden.
“We in the West tend to sleepwalk into surveillance and give away our data in order not to pay anything,” emphasizes Gigerenzer. In the new episode of “So techt Deutschland”, he explains why he still believes that education can make people smarter about digitization.
