You Are Not Your Data.

Does AI Give You Wings?

If so, only one. With one wing, nobody flies.

Volker Viechtbauer knows the line about the wings from the inside: for almost three decades he worked at Red Bull, for many years responsible for legal affairs and human resources. AI, he says, really does raise the floor it writes, calculates, summarizes, faster than any of us. But the second wing checking, choosing, taking responsibility the human being himself must move. This book is about that second wing.

With Viktor Frankl he asks the question behind the dispute over jobs and prosperity: what is left of me when a machine can do more and more of what I was proud of? From the sleep tracker that becomes the judge of one's own night to Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, who wants to relieve people of the burden of freedom, he explores the seduction of a life in which everything is rated and more and more is decided for us. He does not exempt his own way of working: this book was written with AI against AI and with the help of AI and at the end the machine answers the book.

His alternative is called self-forgetfulness: not giving oneself up, but turning toward a task, a person, a cause. Viktor Frankl, who learned in Auschwitz what holds a human being when everything has been taken from him, set the example.

A personal, combative essay by Volker Viechtbauer on performance and trust, the comfort of ready-made answers and the courage to remain imperfect.

Autorentext
Volker Viechtbauer studied law in Linz and in the United States and worked in the courts and as a lawyer before a phone call in late summer 1995 took him to Fuschl am See: Red Bull was looking for its first in-house lawyer. He stayed for almost three decades, many of those years in charge of legal affairs and human resources, and accompanied the rise of the brand at the side of Dietrich Mateschitz. Through him began his engagement with Viktor Frankl, whose image of man freedom, self-responsibility, self-transcendence found its way into the company's personnel work and has shaped his lectures on entrepreneurial spirit and leadership ever since. In 2023 his book Dietrich Mateschitz: Flügel für Menschen und Ideen Mit Red Bull auf den Spuren von Viktor Frankl (Dietrich Mateschitz: Wings for People and Ideas With Red Bull in the Footsteps of Viktor Frankl) was published by Benevento. He writes as a lawyer and a reflective practitioner, not as an AI researcher or therapist critical and curious toward the machine, firmly on the side of the human being. He lives in Salzburg.