A Portrait of a Scientist: Logic, AI and Politics

At the time Alan Turing was engaged in deciphering the code of the Enigma in Bletchley Park and Konrad Zuse applied his patent for the first electronic computer called “Rechenvorrichtung” in Berlin, Jörg was born into the rural capital of the smallest Fürstentum of Germany, called Schaumburg-Lippe, a name even well educated Germans have probably never heard of. Jörg grew up as the oldest son of a family whose male providers had been joiners and curlers for centuries. There has never been a question that one day he would inherit the small family owned curler and joiners workshop. But things turned out otherwise: Schaumburg-Lippe never became an independent Land again and the once respectable Siekmann family of joiners, curlers and church leaders was on the decline: mass furniture production became a highly capital intensive, fully automated business, where a certain Swedish company set the pace. In that process, almost all of the family-owned small and medium sized woodworking companies vanished and the once proud Schaumburg Lippesche Handwerkskammer dating back far into medieval times became obsolete. But Jörg did not quite fit particularly well anyway: when he could not decide whether he wanted to be an artist or a scientist – an idea so inconceivable that his father threatened to cut off all his family ties – he took his juvenile poems and drawings to a family friend who looked at his paintings and poems with a stern expression and suggested: “Son, you better learn the trade of your fathers!” So, Jörg became a joiner’s apprentice in the nearby village of two hundred souls called Scheie, and after three and a half years he passed the traditional examinations and practical tests with some distinction: being now a well recognized member of the German chamber of handicraft entitled to call himself a Tischlergeselle. Two years in the army, a further apprenticeship as a metalworker and welder finally qualified him to enter the Technikum Rosenheim, an engineering school