I am much more worried about humans wiping humans off the earth …

Chris Boos is without doubt one of the most well-known artificial intelligence experts in Europe and he is definitely not afraid of speaking out his mind. His Frankfurt-based, super-successful company Arago revolutionises business IT operations and raised over 55M in private equity in 2014. Since then it has expanded into countries such as the USA, India and England, and serves a number of prestigious customers in the US, Asia and throughout Europe.

A passionate rock ‘n’ roll fan, Chris keeps a music system with a fancy mike right next to the computer in his office. At the Sonophilia Spark in Frankfurt he will speak about business and the creative uses of AI. We interviewed Chris in between flights.

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Sonophilia: Chris, what are the most exciting fields in which you work, that’ll be transformed by AI?

Chris Boos: The interesting field is the strategic application of AI. It was fascinating when we started our first commercialization having our AI be a system administrator and resolving more than 90% of the incoming requests autonomously. It was more fascinating to see how an HR task could be taught to the AI within 2 weeks because the AI already knew the company. It did IT automation quickly where other providers had offered 2 year projects to get the same results. As of what are the most unexpected topics we are facing, I would say these are in running AI in food production. The most interesting topic we are working on is autonomy for space vehicles.

Sonophilia: Why do companies and institutions doing AI research almost always try their hands at creative fields such as arts, music or games?

Chris Boos: Music and art; because creativity is super hard to emulate. Games is another kettle of fish though. AIs need to learn about reality and we cannot have them experiment in our real world (we already know what it feels like when economists try their theories in reality, we wouldn’t want an AI to do that). Games are abstracted simulations of reality and thus a good way to see how an AI would do in real world.

Sonophilia: Do you think that computers and AI might really become so powerful that they could eliminate humanity one day? How might we withstand such a scenario?

Chris Boos: I think this is a totally obsolete question. As long as humanity points nuclear weapons at each other and threatens to shoot them at each other for not good reason but to have strong rhetoric, I am much more worried about humans wiping humans off the earth. Even if machines would be so powerful, why would they bother and not just leave Earth to where there is a better and more resource rich environment for them like the asteroid belts?

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