Our Mission

We are witnessing a global, breathtaking acceleration of technological progress. While computerization initially began in specific domains, today the digital sphere has expanded to shape and transform our everyday lives.

The digital utopia holds out the prospect of many new and exciting things, such as qualities of democratic freedom, global prosperity for humanity, and revolutionary medical advances for human health.

But at the same time, advancements in technology always pose dramatic challenges to established ideas and existing order.

Although we believe that the positive power of this disruption will ultimately outweigh the uncertainties that arise in such a time of change, we also believe that we as a society need to discuss the changes at hand and debate the scenarios that may unfold due to technological change.

We have been dealing with this question since the dawn of time. Thinkers of the antiquities philosophised about the dichotomy of man and machine. Since the era of the industrialisation in the 19th century and the tales of robots in the 20th, we have elevated our imagination. Now we are at a threshold where humans and robots may merge, where enhancement poses the question “What is the human being?” – a phrase uttered by Immanuel Kant in the age of enlightenment.

As part of our logo, we chose the golden spiral to represent the human condition – the Conditio Humana. It is a common depiction of the sectio divina, or golden ratio, which occurs in nature and has profound meaning for aesthetics and the arts, and yet is completely described by mathematics. It is a rather fitting metaphor in our quest to illuminate the common ground of the human condition and technological advancement.

Here at conditiohumana.io we want to be the leading voice that engages in the debate about the future of humankind in the light of digitization – who we want to be, how we want to live, and how technology will help us live up to these ideals and concepts.

Therefore, we are gathering voices from computer scientists, AI pundits, machine learning prodigies, and experts in the humanities, philosophy, history, and ethics alike. It can only be helpful to look into the change at hand from various backgrounds.

The ideal outcome of the journalistic endeavours at conditiohumana.io is the portrayal of the social contract that we want to sign for our societies in the making.