ansgar bittermann

In our special Christmas episode, Ansgar Bittermann, CEO of Goldblum Consulting, is talking to Brother Ken Tsay from the Local Church in Berlin. Ken is originally from Taiwan and after a few years in Switzerland calls Berlin now his home. 
Artificial intelligence is developing in a rapid speed and AI applications become more and more human-like in their behavior. As AI is moving closer and closer to show human-like behavior, many people ask themselves if this will have a substantial impact on religions and religions’ self-perception. 

Thus in our Christmas special today, Brother Ken and I will try to untangle this question and hopefully give you some answers to this existential question. 

We ask "What is a human, what differentiates him from animals?", "What is the Spirit? Is it that bodiless organ which helps us to connect to God?", How does love relate to the Spirit? And could General AI become beings without spirit, eternal beings without the need for god?"

For this podcast about religion, we gave us ground rules. When talking about religion, it is important to be clear and precise to not cause confusion. Fighting about religion is much easier than having an academic, civil discourse.

·       First of all, in this Podcast we assume that God exists. 

·       Secondly, as we are an international truth seeking podcast, we specifically called it broadly “God and AI” and not “the Catholic Church or Islam and AI”. All three book religions (Christianity, Judaism and Islam) pray to the same God. The God of the Christians is the same God the Jews pray to – the God of their Forefather Abraham. And also in Koran Sure 12:39 says: ”And I follow the religion of my fathers Abraham and Isaac and Jacob.”

·       Thirdly, we want to assume that when we talk about God here, we mean the all-mighty God which different religions and cultures gave different names like God, Khodah, Allah or Jehova – but they all mean the same devine being – the Creator of everything. 

·       And fourthly we assume that God’s word has been distorted over hundreds and thousands of years as humans err and sin. Thus we assume – as in an ML algorithm, you have a true value (e.g. the direct discussion which God had with a prophet) and then over the course of hundreds or even thousands of years this conversation or true value was mostly not correctly handed down from generation to generation or was even purposely changed for political or cultural reasons. For example the famous example of the camel which doesn’t fit through the eye of the needle. Some researchers assume that the original text read camelos which meant rope and not camel. Thus religions nowadays express a religious view (or observant variable) which consists of a true value(God’s word) and an error component (what humans made out of it). 
 
 We assume, it is this error component which deflects people’s appreciation of God. We do not oppose religion, but we all have to be aware that human religious expression of any kind is the sum of a true value and an error component. And stressing the erring human component in an religion never critizes God, but takes “the fall of man” into account and applies this to everything we do today. Or as Jesus said: “the one who is without sin, cast the first stone”. 
 
 In order to not fight over debatable components in religions (e.g. the subject of baptism or Trinity or denomination) we will focus today solely on the beginning of the three book-religions and will try to find answers in Genesis – The first book of the Christian Bible, the first book of Moses and thus part of the Hebrew bible or Tanakh and also reference for many aspects of Islam. 

Today we talk with Roland Woldt, Washington DC, and J-M Erlendson, Toronto. Both are working at Software AG as Business Process and Transformation Architect and are also running their own website (and podcast) whatsyourbaseline.com, where they demystify and explain enterprise architechture. 

Our topic today is process mining. As Roland puts it: like footprints in the snow executing processes leave process traces in application systems. And with process mining we can analyse these process traces to discover the underlying processes. We will learn how this works in reality, what a company needs to use this successfully and how it is connected to artificial intelligence.  We wil also talk about process lifecycles,  process mining analysis and how it is connected to task mining and RPA.

Today we are talking to Dr. Anna Melbinger, theoretical physicist and managing consultant at Xenium in Munich. She had been conducting research in Munich, Paris and San Diego and is now supporting and accompanying both IT and Data projects for several years. Anna will try to paint a vivid picture for the listener on how IT and data projects differ while challenging her ideas with Rainer Raupach, Founder of Novedas, Satya Dharnapuram, Consultant at IBM, Dr. Johannes Nehrkorn, Chief product owner for AI Services Siemens Industries and CEO of Goldblum Consulting, Ansgar Bittermann. 

Employees are the backbone of each successful company. But the common hiring process produces 85% disengaged and wrongly hired employees. This results in a high quitting and firing rate or low performances and frustration in the job (for both employer and employee).

Thus the common hiring process is flawed. If you think about it: The whole hiring process is solely designed for the sole purpose of testing, if a person will fit into your company. If the fit is good, the person will feel engaged. If it is bad, the person will underperform, disturb the well-being of your team, quit internally, be fired or leave the company. But with 85% of the employees feeling disenganged and high firing and quitting rates, it seems that the process is 85% of the time wrong and needs to be changed.

And there are well studied science hacks how to flip this number upside down and hire the right candidates 80% of the time! Science has brought us artificial intelligence, improved medicine and a ticket to Mars. But when it comes to hiring, many people still ignore the results science has produced in the field of hiring. We can't talk on the one hand about the "War for Talents" and then on the other hand ignore that our hiring process might be highly underperforming.

For that reason Ansgar Bittermann, CEO of Goldblum, is going to show scientific findings and real life use cases of Goldblum's day2day work on how to use these science-hacks for your advantage and hire the right candidate.

In our next AI Luncheon and Podcast episode, we are going to talk to Darek Kociecki. Darek has an MBA from the Kozminski University and a Master from the SGH Warsaw School of Economics.
He has been working in Business Development for over 10 years and is now Chief Growth Officer at Neoteric. Neoteric itself is developing AI solutions for their global clients, so whom better to talk to than to the CGO of an AI company, in order to learn how to use AI to increase your sales conversions! 

Our topic today is INTERPRETABLE AI and its correlation with Accurate AI. We will learn about Data Driven Architecture, the three algorithms for business analytics (Descriptive algorithms, predictive algorithms and prescriptive algorithms) and Isao will also talk about the new MIT Sloan course "Business  Analytics". In the end he will talk about how the most important AI models fit into the 2-dimensional graph "Accuracy vs Interpretability" and we will discuss which impact or risk highly accurate but low interpretable graphs have. 

Isao, CEO of enFaith, Japan,  himself has worked in the field of IoT service development for many years, worked on optimal energy control for homesin smart cities and was National AI Project Team Leader to develop a recommendation engine that utilises cellular location information. This recommendation engine has been used in Japan during Covid to grasp large-scale movement.

Auxane Boch is associate researcher at the Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence (IEAI) at the TU Munich. She describes herself as a cyber psychologist and explores the opportunities, challenges and ethical considerations of social robots. The IEAI writes in their April Brief: "Robotics technologies are now increasingly used in a multitude of ways related to social interaction with humans. Considering their expanding employment in many areas of everyday life, it is now crucial to understand the implications of robotic technology for users and society." In our next podcast, Auxane will talk with us about this and the latest social robot technology designed for serving humans and will offer an assessment of the ethical considerations needed.

Today we are discussing the term artificial intelligence? What is intelligence? What has a brain area called Broca Area to do with intelligence research? Come with us on a journey through hundred years of intelligence research. We will discuss old and new theories and will end up with a good understanding of the term intelligence and thus artificial intelligence.