Embracing a world of uncertainty
Helga Nowotny’s new ‘intellectual memoir’ underscores why the future needs wisdom
With a life in academia spanning seven decades, any attempt to encapsulate Professor Helga Nowotny’s multi-facetted career as an intellectual is a daunting task.
Since graduating from the University of Vienna in 1959 with a degree in law, the Austrian professor has worked in an array of fields, from law and criminology to sociology, to science and technology studies (STS). In 2024, CUHK conferred on her an honorary doctorate in social science. Her latest book is Future Needs Wisdom, published by the Chinese University of Hong Kong Press (CUHK Press) that she describes as an “intellectual memoir”.
But just what is an intellectual memoir? “It’s definitely not an autobiography, so you will not hear very much about my life, what I did as a child, or the life of my cousins, and so on,” Professor Nowotny noted during a book launch at the CUHK InnoPort. Rather, this is a book that candidly discusses episodes in the professor’s life of academic enquiry, highlighting questions that inspired her, as well as hurdles she faced as a female researcher navigating academia and bureaucracy.
From lecturing at a very young age a class overwhelmingly comprised of male students at her alma mater in Vienna, to her role as President of the newly-established European Research Council, which funds basic research through a personal investigator-centred, bottom-up approach that prioritises scientific excellence, between 2010 and 2013 — she presents all this, and more, with unflinching honesty. The book also includes recent writings by the professor that revisit and update concepts and theories she has propounded over the years.
‘Curious about something I did not understand’
A pivotal moment in Professor Nowotny’s book concerns her first intellectual awakening as a young child in Austria. Having been sent to a region near the Swiss border immediately after World War II, the young Helga began wondering how her Viennese-coded brain suddenly adjusted to the unfamiliar dialects of western Austria. Recounting this experience to CUHK in Focus, she says: “it was an important event for me, to be curious about something I did not understand, but that I could observe in myself.” From then on, she says, she was mesmerised by the world’s mechanisms.
It was this fascination with human phenomena that led Professor Nowotny to one of her most famous contributions to sociology: her 1989 book Eigenzeit. Explaining its title, she defines eigen as belonging and the property of being able to control something, while zeit means time. “It is simultaneously a very rich concept and has a lot to do with our daily life,” the professor says, “because it tries to capture our wish to have time for ourselves”. This insight made waves in the intellectual world about how time itself is conceptualised.
The passage of time – along with the evolution of technology – has only increased Professor Nowotny’s curiosity about how humans experience life. In 2021, she wrote In AI We Trust (a Chinese translation of which was also published by CUHK Press), expressing guarded optimism on the subject. Many have expressed wariness or alarm about AI, suggesting it might eventually replace humans or rob them of important functions. But Professor Nowotny feels positive about its potential benefits: “If we are wise, we would use AI to empower human skills, not just to replace humans.” For example, she says, AI can be used to accelerate scientific research, including the design of experiments and the analysis of academic literature, but always needs careful validation. She believes education is the key: humans are adequately trained to handle AI technology, but a healthy scepticism should also be developed to question the results such technologies produce. Additionally, she believes that AI opens up many new and exciting research questions about the differences between humans and digital machines, obliging us to re-define what makes us uniquely human.
Living with ambivalence
Humanity currently faces a lot of uncertainty: geopolitical tensions have created an unstable world, while the unabated pace of technological development, with its unknowable implications, is unsettling for many. Yet Professor Nowotny’s optimism is undimmed. As she writes in Future Needs Wisdom’s closing pages, wisdom “means learning to live with ambivalence and to embrace uncertainty”.
The professor acknowledges there are legitimate reasons for concern: “There is no absolute certainty in life. But the world is full of probabilities, and we can go by probabilities, and make people understand. With probability, you can act, and it’s better than just being afraid — fear is the worst outcome.” She adds that better communications could lead to a rebuilding of trust in science, and that could ultimately prevail over the pessimism of doomsayers.
Though in her 80s, Professor Nowotny still keeps a busy schedule and remains as active as ever, with a sprightliness that defies her age. She touched on this during the book launch. “For people in academia, there is no real retirement. You continue doing what you have been doing, sharing advice, being on committees, writing… you continue the life that you have led, without teaching. But I still try to keep in touch with young people.”
But is there not a temptation to put up one’s feet, to sit back and let others do the work? With a chuckle the professor replies that although she takes breaks from time to time, she sees no reason to stop doing what she enjoys doing. “And as long as my health is reasonable, I will continue to do that. It’s one of the privileges of being an academic; you just keep on discovering new possibilities.”
By Chamois Chui
Photos by Keith Hiro
