We’re delighted to announce that Eleanor (Year 12), having entered the King’s College German Writing Competition, has placed in first and had her entry published in the winter edition of the Königspost: the German Department’s newspaper read by students and German learners across the UK.
To enter the competition, open to students of German in Years 12 and 13, participants were required to submit a 400-450-word essay on the topic of ‘Die digitale Zukunft’ (the digital future) whilst considering the following ideas and questions:
“We are currently in the midst of a digital revolution. New technologies are transforming our lives, and their impact has increased since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Millions have come to rely on online services, apps and other technological products to navigate their daily realities. But what does our digital future look like? Do new digital technologies pose a threat to society as we know it? Or can they be used to bring about productive change?”
For the German-speaking members of our school community, you’ll be pleased to hear that Eleanor’s winning entry is freely available to read online (page 24). Most kindly, she has also provided a summary (in English!) of her main arguments and points:
“A digital future, as I see it, could provide vast opportunities for the future, particularly for sustainability, but also creates a huge concentration of power in the hands of just a few people. We are at a threshold of human confidence in its own ability but it has also become clear artificial intelligence now is starting to generate answers to problems which humans cannot grasp and which might not necessarily involve humans. AI, for instance, might not be interested in the creation of jobs. Also, the use of AI raises ethical questions such as the capacity of AI to suffer. As we cannot suppress progress, however, we should be working on providing high standards of Ethics and Data Protection to ensure a digital coming of age, a new Enlightenment.”
Congratulations on this exceptional achievement, Eleanor. We can’t wait to see what you do next!