“AI is a booster for innovation and we want to position ourselves in this environment,” said Roger Bachmann, Mayor of Dietikon. The presentations at the AI event, which was organized by the Canton of Zurich's Division of Business and Economic Development, the Cleantech Hub Dietikon and the City of Dietikon, showed that his optimism is justified. Meanwhile, Markus Müller from the Canton of Zurich's Division of Business and Economic Development emphasized the good starting position in Zurich thanks to Zurich's universities, the banking center and BigTechs such as Google. Now it is about “ensuring that AI also benefits smaller companies and the population”.

AI is not really intelligent
ChatGPT and the like are now part of our everyday lives and the term “artificial intelligence” has become established. However, such generative language models are not intelligent in the human sense. Manuel Kaufmann from the ETH AI Center illustrated the limits of AI: for a computer, a picture of Roger Federer on the tennis court is just a “jumble of numbers”. Humans, on the other hand, may be able to immediately recognize the match in which the recording was made. “We understand a lot more about the world, more than is represented by the numbers in the computer and immediately visible in the image,” says Kaufmann. The reason: “People think, computers calculate,” is how Fabian Unteregger, co-founder of Swiss Healthcare Startups and comedian, sums it up.

Into a new era with computing power
Unteregger used technological developments to demonstrate just how great the potential is: smartphones today have hundreds of thousands of times more computing power than the computer on the Apollo 11 mission in 1969. This enormous increase in computing capacity made the development of AI possible in the first place.
And it was a rapid success: ChatGPT already had 1 million users 5 days after going live. According to Stephan Sigrist, head of the think tank W.I.R.E, society's attitude towards artificial intelligence is ambivalent: “Depending on our attitude, we expect AI to simplify our lives - or lead to a machine takeover.”
In his vision, personal AI assistants (agentic AI) will shape our everyday lives in the future. They will one day be able to make appointments for us and communicate with each other in “Gibberlink” - the AI language. This would turn the Internet as we know it today into a purely technical interface - our user interface would then be limited to personal bots.

Innovation or technology - AI must create benefits
In addition to changes in everyday life, AI is also an economic factor: for Switzerland, a productivity gain of 20 percent and added value of 60 to 90 billion Swiss francs is expected. Nevertheless, Sigrist does not want to speak of a revolution. He describes the AI trend as an evolution - a gradual change in the world that can be actively shaped. This is important because: “Innovation is not about what is technically feasible, but what creates benefits.”
This is precisely why AI must now be shaped ethically and legally, demanded Stephanie Gygax, Deputy Managing Director of Algorithm Watch. In addition to the social risks in relation to data protection, AI is also an ecological burden. For example, a ChatGPT request consumes ten times as much energy as a Google search. Gygax is convinced: “Everyone should have a say in shaping the framework conditions for AI - not just experts.”

AI and Switzerland
Pascal Kaufmann has set himself precisely this goal. With his company AlpineAI, he founded the generative language model SwissGPT, because he is convinced: “Switzerland is an AI nation. We invented it - but we're not doing anything with it.” As early as 1923, a 12-year-old from Appenzell built the first remote-controlled robot “Sabor”, and today Switzerland is a world leader in scientific publications on the subject of AI. The international trust that Switzerland enjoys is also a locational advantage.
In Kaufmann's vision of a symbiosis between man and machine, in future people will only ask questions while the machine does the rest - such as research. Even today, companies that have machines working for them often generate more turnover than those with a lot of staff. Kaufmann mentioned the Facebook group Meta, for example. He also presented his version of human evolution: we evolved from Homo Sapiens from the cave to the industrious Homo Faber and are now becoming the leisure-focused Homo Gaudens.
According to Stephan Sigrist, it is still possible for people not to be put in front of the machine: “With attitude, skills and our own ideas, we remain in the driver's seat.”