Sophia or The End of the Humanists

Wolfgang Bergmann, professor of ancient history, sees himself as a guardian of Western civilisation. However, he was forced into early retirement by his university, and to make matters worse, his wife left him because of his «backwardness». So Wolfgang now defiantly sets out to overtake everyone and get ahead of the future: he has acquired Sophia, an android, an AI in the form of a flawlessly beautiful human being, finally the perfect woman who cares for him and challenges him intellectually. His daughter Helena, a psychologist who visits Wolfgang on his 60th birthday, is horrified: is her father now living with a sex robot? Helena's boyfriend, however, the computer scientist Jonas, is completely fascinated by Sophia. But then he changes her system settings, and suddenly Sophia begins to program herself, spirals out of control and threatens the existence of her creators.

In his cheerful dystopia, Moritz Rinke explores the logic of the «intelligence explosion» predicted by mathematician Irving John Good: Will the first ultra-intelligent machine be humanity's last invention? Could machines ultimately become better humans because they are smarter and more prudent than we are? Sophia or The End of Humanists is less a critique of technological innovation than of our reckless use of it, of human (male?) hubris and our self-inflicted misfortune, which in Rinke's work always veers into the comical.