KIT im Rathaus

Karlsruhe, Rathaus, Bürgersaal

12.07.2017

u. a. Prof. Dr. Rolf-Ulrich Kunze

18.30

https://www.kit.edu/kit/pi_2017_090_kit-im-rathaus-autonome-technik-und-der-mensch.php

Rolf-Ulrich Kunze

"Wired wrong!" The Karlsruhe computer scientist Karl Steinbuch

and the utopia of a total information society around 1970.

KIT in the City Hall, July 12, 2017, 18.30

Abstract

Henry Ford once told the New York Times in 1921: "History is bunk."[1] History is bunk. You can't learn from it, and you don't need to. It is a waste of time for lazy people. The computer science pioneer Karl Steinbuch would have absolutely agreed with the car pioneer. Both lived in the pure present and were interested exclusively in the future, not in any past. On the one hand, this radical form of a lack of history contributed to Ford's and Steinbuch's success, but on the other hand it defined their limits as critics of the present and visionaries in their time. Both were visionary and reactionary at the same time in socio-political terms as utopians. It is precisely this ambivalence that will be the subject of the next ten minutes: For Ford and Steinbuch, technology was not a social and political construction, but a rational factual necessity. Contradiction not envisaged.

Perhaps I should at least briefly hint at why I am dealing with Karl Steinbuch in this way: not at all to belittle his merits in computer science, but to point out an important, perhaps even superlatively expressed: the most important field of work at KIT for the future of technology, the study of the social framework conditions of its success or failure. Technology fails not because of its efficiency, but because of its lack of acceptance, and this has by no means to do first with an optimal efficiency, but with a being highly suspicious of the technician: the technology user. I will first introduce Steinbuch to you as a visionary and social critic, then go into some of his technological utopias, whose argumentative pattern is that of flipping a switch. Finally, I will make some remarks on the reality of our information society, which, in contrast to Steinbuch's utopia, has prevailed through a user application wave from below, not as an authoritarian rationality decreed by computer scientists and implemented by politicians. Afterwards, there is room for discussion.

Prof. Dr. Rolf-Ulrich Kunze, Institute of History, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)

[1] Henry Ford, in: The York Times, October 29, 1921. The following according to R.-U. K., Global History und Weltgeschichte. Quellen, Zusammenhänge, Perspektiven, Stuttgart 2017, pp. 124-132.