PVP-Newsletter 2025-12-22  Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year– ‘…What you have inherited from your fathers, acquire it to possess it…’‘The spirits I summoned / I now cannot get rid of’

PVP-Newsletter 2025-12-24	Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Buon Natale e Felice Anno Nuovo! Feliz Natal e um bom Ano Novo. God Jul Och Ett Gott Nytt  Ar.	Joyeux Noël et Bonne Année. Feliz Navidad y Próspero Año Nuevo Glaedelig Jul og godt nyter. Vrolijk Kerstfeest en een Gelukkig Nieuw Jaar.

Thanks to be part of a community which tries to make the world a little bit safer……

“Zusammenkommen ist ein Beginn Zusammenbleiben ist ein Fortschritt Zusammenarbeiten ist ein Erfolg” (Henry Ford)

“Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.” (Henry Ford)

‘…What you have inherited from your fathers, acquire it to possess it…’
‘The spirits I summoned / I now cannot get rid of’

Ladies and Gentlemen,
After our newsletter generated a surprising amount of response at the turn of 2024, we did some research and are quoting Johann Wolfgang Goethe on this topic today.
Goethe and artificial intelligence (AI), you may ask.
Let’s hear from the old master himself and quote some verses from ‘Faust, Part One’ that you are surely familiar with:

With wheel and comb, roller and iron.
I stood at the gate, you should be the key;
Though your beard is curly, you do not lift the bolts.
Mysterious in the light of day,
Nature cannot be robbed of its veil,
And what it may not reveal to your spirit,
You cannot force it to reveal with levers and screws.
You old tool that I have not used,
You old device that I never used,
You’re only here because my father needed you.
You old reel, you are getting smoked,
As long as the dim lamp smoulders on this desk.
I would have been much better off squandering my little,
Than sweating here burdened with it!
What you have inherited from your fathers,
Acquire it in order to possess it.
What is not used is a heavy burden,….

As early as 1808, the poet emphasised that knowledge which we do not actively use ultimately remains useless. But is it really enough to feed computer programmes with tons of paper from our ancestors and leave the thinking to them?
Goethe himself provides the answer, urging us to actively process and understand what we have inherited from our ancestors using human intelligence (HI), rather than leaving the thinking to a machine…and in his famous ballad ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’, he describes very vividly how dangerous the use of misunderstood knowledge can be. The cry for help, ‘The spirits I called, I cannot now get rid of,’ from the young sorcerer who put himself in danger with a spell stolen from his master, has become proverbial.
And isn’t it paradoxical that we are destroying our livelihoods by digging for coal, drilling for gas and playing with uranium to obtain additional energy for machines, for machines that are supposed to take over our thinking, the very characteristic that distinguishes us from all other living beings?

Unlike last year, the graphic is not the work of AI but of the real-life artist Christiana Schwarz, who has explored these ideas artistically.

You can then ‘count on us’ again from 06 January 2025.

Rest assured, no avatar will be on the phone with you in the ‘New Year’, no chatbot will read and answer your emails.
We will remain old-fashioned human, I can vouch for that.

And unlike far too many of our fellow citizens who are very present in public, the employees of LES GmbH and Ingenieurbüro Dr.-Ing. Gert Lau will neither lament nor obstruct in the New Year, but instead debate without taboos, discuss constructively and simply get on with it.

If we all act together in this way, there may still be a chance of leaving our great-grandchildren an intact, clean and debt-free world.

Personally, I hope that performance will be much better rewarded again in the New Year and I am proud that my employees get up every day to give their best.

Stay healthy!

Your ‘Simulanten vom Aggerstrand’.

PS: This blog post was also written by a „person of flesh and blood“ 🙂