As always, Hal Faber’s newsreel wants to sharpen the eye for the details: The Sunday newsreel is commentary, outlook and analysis. It is both a backward and a preview.

What was . Thinking is by no means knowing. Proverb

Beware when God sends a thinker to this planet. Ralph Waldo Emerson

The fun is when the fireworks are blown with his own powder ….. Shakespeare, Hamlet

Three proverbs that refer to the human ability to think. If a person has the courage to use his own understanding and does not allow himself to be dissuaded by a curfew, a lot is possible, up to and including the big bang of the fireworker who blows himself up with his own powder. Years ago 70 the article “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” by Alan M. Turing appeared in a British magazine. The German version took a little longer, but went straight to the point: “Can machines think?” was the title of the essay in Kursbuch 8 from March 1959, which was published by Hans Magnus Enzensberger. It was Enzensberger who chose the proverbs when he designed the course book on mathematics. Originally Turing’s text was supposed to appear under the title “The Imitation Game”, but that sounded too unmathematical. After all, the essay was in a volume in which John von Neumann reported on the “general and logical theory of automata” and Claude Levi Strauss reflected on the “mathematics of man”. Bertrand Russell’s text on “Mathematics and Metaphysicians” can also be found in the course book, although Russell himself found the text unsuccessful because it was written much too romantically.

Dystopia, then: “Das Millionenspiel” on German TV showed 42 years ago how television cannibalized and fueled the deadly hunt for a candidate – fatal influence of (future) media on users, society, moral values.

So be it. Can machines think, that can be answered succinctly like the linked HNF blog, which offers a solution to the Turing test based on the Turing text for the year 2050 predicts. Today it is not yet in sight: “Speaking is not the same as thinking, and the dialogues that Alan Turing had in mind are only a small part of communication. Our language arises from our world, we learn its words in this world and in human community through sensory impressions and emotional experiences. The language is diverse: We tell, complain, rant, praise and blame, thank and swear, talk and poetry. In addition, we talk to artificial systems like Alexa and Siri, but the It remains closed to both of them what we – and they themselves – are actually talking about. ”

Turing himself assumed, by the way, that people always match thinking machines To be one step ahead because humans have a skill that machines lack: They are telepathic. For Turing there were four manifestations that machines could not reproduce, “namely telepathy, clairvoyance, prophecy and psychokinesis. These exciting phenomena seem to contradict all our usual scientific ideas. How much we would like to deny them! Unfortunately, they are statistical indications, at least for telepathy, overwhelming. It is often overlooked that Turing demanded for the demonstration that the “imitation game” must be played in a “telepathy-impermeable room.” Since not until today it is clear how such a room can be built, the real Turing test is still pending. For the poet Enzensberger, who produced great poetry like “Die Scheisse”, the matter was already clear, as he wrote in the course book: “As is well known, the automatons learn excellent, just obviously not to write poetry. That doesn’t necessarily have to speak against the theories, but certainly against the sense of mission of the practitioners and certainly against the nervousness of authors who believe they have to compete with the apparatus or have already capitulated. ” A very special form of telepathy occupied the American science fiction author Robert Sheckley in his 1959 published novel about immortality, filmed as “Freejack” with the immortal Richard Jagger. In the distant future one can see the entire consciousness of a dying person store it in a database in the computer for a short time and transfer it from there to another body. In one case it didn’t work out that well and the dying man survived the procedure. He becomes an outlaw, a freejack with a bounty and the therefore being chased by a gang of murderers. Sheckley varied a motif from a short story “The Pr ice of Peril “from the year 1958. It went down in television history as “The Millionaire Game” and was broadcast today 50 years ago. Accompanied by the music of Can, which at that time was still called Innerspace, the Köhler gang hunt down a person who has a bounty of one million DM. The million game, mentioned several times in this column, showed how dystopian media basically have a fatal influence on their users, society and their moral values. Incidentally, the script for the German TV spectacle was written by Wolfgang Quantity, who was released to the day 42 years after the first broadcast of the Spectacle died, another unspectacular piece of the mosaic with the puzzling number 42.

In the European Union a guideline for the protection of whistleblowers has been created. “From . December 2021 Whistleblowers should be able to rely on secure channels for passing on information both within companies and to the authorities. In addition, they should be effectively protected against dismissal, harassment or other forms of retaliation. ” The directive concerns information on money laundering, corporate taxation, data protection and food safety. But what does a courageous geriatric nurse like Brigitte Heinisch do, who unearthed grievances in her nursing home? The care is not covered by the EU directive and so it was okay from the perspective of the German courts when Heinrich was dismissed. Only the European Court of Justice gave her 2011 after many years right. In this respect, it is good and important if a German hero protection law is now called for, which encourages courage and accompanies those who are courageous. “If such a right had existed for a long time, then the exhaust gas manipulation of the car companies would have been, then the large-scale fraud at Wirecard would have been exposed much earlier.”

Igor Levit may be a bad pianist who cannot play legato, a bad Jew and an unworthy Cross of Merit, if you like, one could even criticize his beard, although his “competitor” Daniil Trifonov also wears such a lint of mouth. But what is the anti-Semitic “victim claim sidelogy” that a music critic in the Süddeutsche Zeitung quoted about the hero protection law accuses him of? What is this “moral right to hatred and defamation” that Jews claim for themselves in the view of this critic? Is the disgusting piece an analysis of the present whose absurdity is star