“Consciousness can never be digitalized”.

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In our latest Espresso Talks podcast episode, Prof. Ute Schmid (Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg) highlights that an AI can say it’s sorry you have a headache, but it can never actually feel it.With a Full Professorship for Cognitive Systems and diplomas in both Psychology and Computer Science, Prof. Schmid has spent 30 years cutting through the hype of every AI wave. She makes one thing clear: the real competitive edge isn't in chatbots — it's in meaningful applications, particularly in industrial and chemical data, paired with methods that keep humans in control and integrate domain knowledge.

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Key topics we cover:

• The Industrial Edge — Why Europe's advantage lies in industrial data, chemical processes, and engineering rather than scaling LLMs.
• Solving for Production — How to move from "doing AI" to tackling specific, high-cost problems on the production line.
• The AGI Marketing Stunt  —  Why certain aspects of human intelligence cannot be digitalized, and why the race for "human-like" AI is largely a distraction from building tools that solve complex problems.

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Tune in for the full episode:

🎬 YouTube: https://youtu.be/Zw8J1jorcJQ?si=mXcMfbVNk-g7YLFV

🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3NZiYqWTBgFHS2UDCN81ZG?si=uoy8_0xKTDKY0u1aPqsfBw

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