Sonnenallee: One of your arguments is that in our digitalized world humans are making themselves obsolete as a species, homo obsoletus. What brings you to the conclusion that humans are making themselves obsolete?

Anders Indset: Lots of people don’t think for themselves anymore. They are driven and programmed by stimuli. They are overwhelmed by the mass of information so they allow online search engines to narrow down their choices, enabling themselves to be managed by recommendation algorithms and thereby becoming prisoners of their own freedom. They feel as though they constantly have to deliver and perform. I liken it to a form of self-exploitation. But what humans are increasingly lacking is their own initiative, independent thinking and personal positive ideals.

So your plea is for us to slow down. Do you think that the current pandemic is forcing people to slow down?

AI: I’m not seeing any signs of that at the moment. I don’t believe that the current coronavirus pandemic is a relevant factor in inspiring change as such. But it may have the potential to accelerate the underlying forces of change. I get the impression at the moment that things that used to take ten years are now becoming possible within ten months. So I think we are speeding up rather than slowing down. Anyway, only genuine crises can inspire true upheaval.

You don’t class the current situation as a genuine crisis?

AI: It may well seem like a crisis for a decadent society. But, from my perspective, it isn’t a real crisis. Real crises are more threatening to our very existence. They are a matter of life, of survival. Obviously we’re going through some tough times at the moment and people are extremely worried. It’s just that, in my eyes, a real crisis looks somewhat different. It entails a lot more pain and anguish. It involves a situation like we had after the Second World War in Europe.

So what do you consider to be the bigger issue at the moment?

AI: The issue is less that coronavirus is infecting us, but rather that our thinking was already infected before coronavirus. We respond to tweets and headlines in a purely superficial way nowadays. We come upon absolutes and ideologies that we don’t even understand anymore. But it is in times of chaos, in particular, that people look for simple solutions and stable structures, and that’s a dangerous thing. This leads to reactionism. But we have to question our old self-evident truths in order to come to an understanding of the world, to understand a complex world by learning to comprehend the interdependencies.

How do we do that? Where, specifically, would you start?

AI: More than ever, social media are telling us that we need to be against something. But what we really need is a lot more fresh inspiration, ideas and solutions. I don’t think that the problem can be resolved by politics. Politics is mainly about preservation and administration and less about creation. What we need to do is heal our thinking, and this can only be achieved through education. Our learning is geared toward passing a final exam or getting a good grade. This thinking is completely outdated. In this day and age, our computational skills are already completely inferior to technology. So we need to think in the blanks that artificial intelligence cannot fill. Instead, we need to teach young people the ability to learn and think independently. Today, it’s all about the interaction between man and machine and the future of organized human life. We need people with the capacity to be creative, today and tomorrow. People who understand people. That is a rather practical philosophy.