The Chinese author was live from Switzerland on Friday evening.
(Photo: Markus Kirchgessner for Handelsblatt)
Frankfurt Kai-Fu Lee and Qiufan Chen won the German Business Book Prize 2022 for the book “KI 2041 – Ten Visions of the Future”, published by Campus Verlag. The jury selected the book from a shortlist of ten titles.
The award was presented at a celebratory gala on Friday evening as part of the Frankfurt Book Fair. The prize money is 10,000 euros.
The jury, which consists of high-ranking representatives from business and science, chose Lee and Chen’s book because it deals with the topic of coping with the future in a pioneering way and provides a well-founded contribution to the debate on one of the defining questions of our time.
“It’s more forward-looking than any of the other books,” the jury said. The book is an important contribution for society and economy to improve the understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) and its effects.
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>>Read here: Kai-Fu Lee and Qiufan Chen design future scenarios for the year 2041
Renowned AI expert Kai-Fu Lee, a native of Taiwan, and Chinese science fiction writer Qiufan Chen co-developed the idea for this unusual book, in which Chen first creates a story in each chapter that is an “analysis” of the Technology follows, which took center stage in the story. The authors clearly show the upsides and downsides of each technology.
Kai-Fu Lee, Quifan Chen: KI 2041. Ten Visions of the Future.
Campus Publisher
Frankfurt 2022
534 pages
26 euros
Despite all the possibilities of manipulation, the basic tenor of the book is optimistic. “Like most technologies, AI is neither good nor bad in itself,” says co-author Lee himself. That was the case with all fundamental innovations. In the long term, the positive social effects would also have a greater impact on AI. “Just think of the tremendous benefits of electricity, cell phones and the internet.”
“Anyone who has to deal with chatbots when calling companies today is occasionally annoyed and longs for human communication,” says Hans-Jürgen Jakobs, senior editor of the Handelsblatt and chairman of the jury. “But it doesn’t help: We have to deal with all facets of the future topic of AI. The book we awarded provides a blueprint for this.”
For the first time, the readers of the Handelsblatt were also able to vote for their favourites. The undoped reader’s prize goes to “Autocorrect. Mobility for a world worth living in” by Katja Diehl, published by S.Fischer Verlag. Around 2500 readers cast their votes. Most of them went to the traffic expert’s book.
Her work is “a mission,” said Katja Diehl (right) at the award ceremony. “To stand here now with this touches me very much.”
(Photo: Markus Kirchgessner for Handelsblatt)
Diehl has been fighting for the traffic turnaround for 15 years. She is the national board member of the Verkehrsclub Deutschland, produces a mobility podcast, and works as an expert on various committees. In her book, the author questions the omnipotence of the car in Germany. The Hamburg native not only explains how the car became the number one means of transport, but also shows the constraints that keep making people dependent on the car.
>>Read here: Review: How a departure from the car could succeed
The German Business Book Prize is awarded by the Handelsblatt, the Frankfurt Book Fair and the investment bank Goldman Sachs, which donates the prize money. With the award, the partners want to underline the importance of the business book in conveying economic relationships and make a contribution to economic education in society.
The motto of the prize is therefore “Understanding business”. It was awarded for the 16th time.
More: All information about the German Business Book Prize 2022