Successful IT reception for the city of Paderborn: Business development and SICP focus on artificial intelligence
Hans-Christian Blecke is an author. As a copywriter, the Paderborn native has been developing effective strategies for companies for more than ten years. "Communication is our everyday life," says Blecke. In recent weeks and months, this has changed thanks to artificial intelligence, or AI for short. Hans-Christian Blecke has since been increasingly confronted with the question: "Will ChatGPT put you out of work?"
At the IT reception hosted by the Paderborn Economic Development Corporation (WFG) and the SICP - Software Innovation Campus of Paderborn University, the guests at the start of Hans-Christian Blecke's lecture were largely in agreement: authors of texts are at risk from AI. Blecke will be out of a job.
AI, digitalization, IT: all of these play a major role in Paderborn's economy, as Mayor Michael Dreier made clear in his welcome address. He is delighted that the IT reception can once again take place in the historic town hall after a three-year break and that around 100 entrepreneurs have accepted the invitation: "The importance of digitalization and artificial intelligence for our urban development cannot be emphasized enough," said Dreier. He is looking forward to exchanging ideas with the companies in order to "shape Paderborn's future together."
Christian Neugebauer and Stefan Freise from code-x presented what AI can do and what the program can already be used for in everyday life. They used examples to show how ChatGPT can be used to plan a vacation or create training plans.
The humorous introduction to the topic was followed by Nikolas Hemion, Manager for Artificial Intelligence at dSPACE. In his keynote speech, he presented how the Paderborn-based company processes incredible amounts of data to enable autonomous driving in the future. The measuring vehicle collects up to 10 terabytes of road traffic data per hour. For comparison: 1 terabyte can hold around 6.5 million pages of documents. If 10 terabytes of data were printed out, the result would be a stack of A4 pages 6.5 kilometers high. And that every hour. "These volumes of data have to be processed," says Nikolas Hemion. To do this, dSPACE uses supercomputers on which the neural networks of an AI are trained.
Finally, author Hans-Christian Blecke takes to the stage in the town hall. Everyone agrees that his job is at risk due to AI. But is that really the case? "There's always a job for good work," says Blecke. Think of carpenters: "If you want to buy a table that is something special, that will stand in your home for more than 30 years, do you go to a furniture discounter? - Probably not." In his presentation, he addresses the question of how AI will change writing and communication in the future. "AI is ideal for used texts," says Blecke. "Nobody would hire a copywriter if they wanted to write an invitation or an email."
But who will be made redundant by artificial intelligence? Hans-Christian Blecke also has an answer to this: French teachers. The reason is simple, "because AI will soon be able to ensure that we can talk to everyone in the world with a button in our ear." "The job of language teachers is not completely at risk, but it will change significantly. In the future, teachers will have to convey the cultures and histories of different countries instead of just teaching the vocabulary and grammar of the respective language," explains Prof. Dr. Gregor Engels, professor at Paderborn University and Chairman of the SI-Lab at the SICP.
WFG Managing Director Uwe Schoop is certain that the topic of artificial intelligence will accompany the IT reception for some time to come: "Today, we have also addressed important topics relating to ethics, data and climate protection, which are also affected by AI." In this respect, he is certain that there will be numerous other opportunities for the WFG and the SICP to approach the topic in various events with different focal points.
