Dieber Bernhard

This essay summarizes the claims on IT security that have been presented and discussed during the workshop “YuMi in Action! Ethics and Engineering as Transdisciplinary Robotics Performance”. As a sort of “Ems Telegram” in the era of digital transformation, this essay aims to be a cross-disciplinary thought provocation on IT security and what Bismarck, Prussian's 19th-century militarism and industrial quality ‘Made in Germany’ may teach us in this respect, such as values of technical functionality like accuracy, precision, standardization, resilience, accessibility, simplicity, autarchy, and reliability. What we definitely not want to take over are ideologies which have contributed to the horrible 20th-century world wars, war crime, antisemitism or racism in any fashion. Joining the perspectives of a philosopher of technology, a computer scientist and a robotics researcher, our goal is to work towards a (maybe utopian) world where IT security as a problem disappears. To this end, we propose the concept of ‘Bismarck 4.0’ as an alternative draft in times of cyber warfare and social robots that overrun our firewalls like herds of next generation Trojan horses. Basic elements of this approach include strategic de-networkification as well as a clear emphasis on strengthening IT autarchy and resilience. The resulting position of newly gained strength will allow to increase network- and user-centric quality (including security) as well as, eventually, to go for a sustainable openness and neutrality by design. In this away, we arguably introduce some historical experimental evidence into a current debate that, ironically, refers to almost identical problem settings.

In three sections some interactions at the workshop “YuMi in Action! Ethics and Engineering as Transdisciplinary Robotics Performance” and related later reflections are summarized. The primary emphasis is to illustrate what transdisciplinarity is and how transdisciplinarity could work as a certain form of scientific cooperation. Therefore four principles of biomedical ethics are applied to human robot interactions just like the VDI codex of engineering ethics. Methodological fundamentals of transdisciplinary cooperation are discussed related to concrete medical applications of the robot “YuMi.” In the last section the question of transdisciplinary research is (experimentally) related to the metaphor of “social submarines” and concrete practical issues that endanger real transdisciplinarity. Here we close with the question whether children´s more or less unbiased imagination could be seen as a requirement of real transdisciplinarity.