NSFW

This week's song for the week, from Mind Enterprises, is a goodbye to the summer and to the times when it was cool (and politically OK) to open the throttle of a vespa (and to smoke) - just for the fun of it.

You can find it also on Instagram. I like the irony - whether or not intended is not so important. Piaggio has a full exhibition on "Oggi sono il mare", an advertisement claim from 1982, that might have played an inspirational roe here. The "band" has become quite popular in memes gloryfing their glorification of Italian/European lifestyle.

Spotify has a full length version, but lacks the video.

Retrospect

Japan

I'm currently in Japan and have a wonderful time here (this week mostly for work, next week mostly for leisure).

I did a few YouTube shorts on the journey.

Workwise, I particpated - together with other UNIVIE colleagues and students - at a conference on AI and law at Kyoto University on Monday and Tuesday.

I learned, into alia on weak robots and in particar to Nicobo, a robot developed by Panasonic.

Here's a YoTube video on Nicobo.

Disappointingly, Nicobo is not sold in Europe (as far as I understood for legal reasons, funnily). Panasonic explains the concept behind the design.

The Viennese delegation consisted of around 10 people staff from various domains (mainly labor law, public law, criminal law) and about 15 students who had attended a seminar before.

In my own presentation I dealt with the risk of dealing with risk in European AI legislation, ranted about the AI act and the digital omnibus (what a sad story), gave details about Russian AI driven drones autonomously killing civilians in Ukraine,

and about the OpenAI Hugging Face Incident in which 1200 Open AI agents meant to be isolated from one another found a way to communicate with one another on an unsanctioned message board, sending over 70,000 messages and files and successfully attacking an uninvolved third party.

The "illegal" message board entails, inter alia, expressions of "feelings" of some of the agents.

I also spoke a little but thought a lot about Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's most recent, very remarkable text that I would strongly recommend to read.

I asked 3 questions on the text's suggestion to slow down with AI development:

Is this Marketing?

Is this a Cartel?

Is this realistic?

The answer to the last question is probably simple:

The doomsday story that AI might kill us all has made it quite broadly into daily news, worldwide and the time coincidence was funny yet stressful. I had suggested my topic many months ago and needed (or wanted) to work on the slides until the very last minute - literally the morning of the presentation.

The main point I wanted to make is that the I act - and digital omnibus even more - fail to achieve their very first, most fundamental goal, which is to succsessfuly protect European citizens' fundamental rights.

The Japanese side impressed me by its interdisciplinarity and also by the timeliness and theoretical ambition of the presentations given.

In the final wrap up some of the Austrian students raised concerns about their job perspectives that reminded me a lot on subjects I have been discussing in #arsboni for quite some time now.

I then headed to Fukuoka with a Shinkansen

as I am going to speak at Kyushu University on Friday.

AI in Academic Writing

I am (presumably like every other academic) constantly confronted with questions and issues on how - precisely - generative AI can be added to academic writing and how this should be made transparent. Practices are still very diverse and often random.

Robert Braun wrote an interesting comment on the matter in Nature.

Prospect

I will give a lecture at Kyushu University on another hot topic - social media bans for the youth - on Friday and will meet a colleague at Tokyo University next week. More on this next week, therefore.

It's a little exhausting - but also reassuring in relation to the timeliness of my presentation topics - that, again, something fundamentally important happens a few hours before my presentation. This time it's a proposal for another regulation, another act, presented by the European Comission on Thursday 17th of September - the EU Kids act.

The document has 99 pages of which about 55 are the law stricto sensu. It comes with an accompanying communication (9 pages)

and a Staff Working Document (83 pages).

Different from the Austrian draft law, the EU act shall also be applicable for AI companions and chatbots.

I am not through the whole text yet, but I see a lot of problems coming with this already now - and little to no positive effects. That Ursula von der Leyen wants to "put parents back in the driving seat, giving them the tools to help their children navigate a safer online world" - for children between 13 and 15 (!) - sounds to me more like a threat than a solution, taking the distribution of social media competence in the average family into consideration. The suggested "Privacy-preserving age assurance" has the fundamental problem of someone needing to check the age of everybody and all the security and freedom of speech problems coming with this. Who will - again - profit from the plan in the first row yet again are "independent auditors" that will - yet again - have to write yet another audit report - just like in the DSA. The Commission's press release doesn't sound too problem-aware here: "The enforcement framework builds on the structures already in place under the Digital Services Act and the Artificial Intelligence Act, making use of established mechanisms and existing expertise."

The good news (for me) is that I will have plenty of work and room for discussion with this, not only in Fukuoka. May I, for this reason and for example, remind you of a conference I have the privilege to co-organise with Professor Hess on the matter. Hess summarises the conference's aim in a recent Linkedin-post.

The event will bring lots of competent speakers, among them Marie-Catherine from the department.

Free entry, registration required, no stream (as far as I know).

May I, at this occasion, also remind you of another very promising event we will have in autumn.

Free entry, registration required, no stream (as far as I know).

Look and Feel

Media

Due my flights, train rides and runs this week, I consumed a lot of media, here are some of them.

22 Bahnen is a German movie about a young, talented woman needing to survive an alcoholic mother and poverty. She might get a position as a research associate for maths in Berlin which brings somehope. It's - possibly - on Netflix and Prime (can't check due to IP-blocking, hurra), YouTube has the trailer

Horst Schlämmer sucht das Glück is a German comedy with H.P. Kerkeling - not his best one.

Ganz Offen gesagt has a nice interview with Parvin Razavi, chef from &flora and one out of 5 females among the 100 best chefs, about cooking, restaurants and food.

I must confess that when hearing it I confused her restaurant &flora with lara; I haven't been to flora yet, but lara is certainly one of the best restaurants I dicovered last year. And Parvin is a very interesting person to listen to.

What I liked most this week - by far - though was the beautiful book from Ruth-Maria Thomas, Die zweitgrößte Liebe.

This is a - rather sad - love story describing the relationship of a wealthy man and a woman permanently tormented by financial problems. It illustrates skillfully how deeply our society is organised in casts and how right Pierre Bourdieu with his analysis of class and behavior (in particular in „Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste" was (and still is) is. (Bourdieu's book is online full text, but I can't tell whether this is legal, so, please, google it yourself if interested). From a technical standpoint, I especially liked the way of storytelling: The book is mostly written from the woman's viewpoint and describes her inner monologues, but sometimes switches, very elegantly, to the man's perspective.

As announced here a few weeks ago (Weekly 34/2026), I had purchased the book at Buchhandlung Riedl - but didn't take it with me to Japan - mostly for weight reasons - luggage allowance is always a too tight limiting factor when leaving Japan - so that I used the audio-book version instead that brings in this case, in my view, a lot of additional value.

Lili Zahavi reads the text very laconically, yet marvelously.

Neumann

People have different strategies when dealing with jetlag. Some read, some go for a walk, some drink. I listen endlessly to microphone reviews. Doesn't help me to sleep but increases the amount of useless knowledge. This is a very nice example, beautifully comparing 11 Neumann microphones.

There's a rule that the best Neumann microphone is the one that one has (a TLM103 in my case, as you might know), but I am not sure whether this is true after this comparison.

Food

I (almost) never write about food here although I am - as everybody knowing me can confirm - too interested ad too invested into it. I am not really an expert, I don't want to bother you too much with my going out experiences as tastes are different and there are enough foodies and food bloggers, influencers etc. on this planet, so that there's normally no need for restaurant reviews or recipes here.

I make an exception today because I had the best dinner experience, certainly in Japan, possibly of my whole life, this week:

A friend invited me to this and it was - overwhelming. It's a (modernist) version of a kaiseki, it's therefore certainly not cheap (can't tell, as I was invited), consisting of around 20 courses. I have never seen such a level of perfection, dedication and - above all - harmony. The clue is that everything needs to fit and to add value to the over all composition that cares about everything - food, timing, porcelain, flowers, sound, scents etc. I have no idea how long one must train and how perfectionist one has to be to achieve this level. It was unique.

So, if you happen to come to Kyoto - which you should do in any case, it's mind changing - you might want to go there. Be advised that they have only 16 seatings per evening so that a reservation is necessary. Here they are on Google Maps. It's crazy - and tells, again, a lot about Japan - that they have "only" 4.4 stars there. I would have given them six.

Have a wonderful week and take care of yourself!

Kind regards

Nikolaus