Instead, the people the colonels had sought out in a stuffy top-floor room were a small team of literary scholars led by Jürgen Wertheimer, a professor of comparative literature with wild curls and a penchant for black roll-neck s.Īfter the officers had left, the atmosphere among Wertheimer’s team remained tense. The academics weren’t AI specialists, or scientists, or political analysts. The name of the initiative was Project Cassandra: for the next two years, university researchers would use their expertise to help the German defence ministry predict the future. Yet the two high-ranking officials in field-grey Bundeswehr uniforms who stepped out of the Y-plated vehicle on 1 February 2018 had travelled into hostile territory to shake hands on a collaboration with academia, the like of which the world had never seen before. In 2018, there was growing resistance on campus against plans to establish Europe’s leading artificial intelligence research hub in the surrounding area: the involvement of arms manufacturers in Tübingen’s “cyber valley”, argued students who occupied a lecture hall that year brought shame to the university’s intellectual tradition. A picturesque 15th-century university town that brought forth great German minds including the philosopher Hegel and the poet Friedrich Hölderlin, it is also a modern stronghold of the German Green party, thanks to its left-leaning academic population. Military men are a rare, not to say unwelcome, sight in Tübingen. The letter Y, however, is reserved for members of the armed forces. In Germany, the first few letters usually denote the municipality where a vehicle is registered. #Strophes boulez scribd windows#As the car with the blacked-out windows came to a halt in a side street near Tübingen’s botanical gardens, keen-eyed passersby may have noticed something unusual about its number plate.
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