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Mercedes-Benz FutureInsight - Human first - empathy as anchor in the digital transformation - Clip 2

What does a desirable future that is worth living look like? How can individuality and digital transformation be reconciled? How can trust be established between humans and machines? A series of "FutureInsight" debates from Mercedes-Benz address questions like these. In these debates, Mercedes-Benz experts discuss such questions around the theme of mobility with academics, artists, media representatives and specialists from a wide range of fields. The aim is to gain inspiration and food for thought, which then can be helpful for their own future mobility activites. At the FutureInsight event in Berlin on 21 and 22 November, the focus was on empathy and trust as topics.For many people, the theme of "digital transformation" conjures up a vague feeling somewhere between fascination and uncertainty. Fascination because digital technologies can drastically simplify complex activities, find amazing solutions and offer unique opportunities. Uncertainty because futuristic visions of complete automation seem to leave little room for human individuality and our ability to act.Because there are diverse issues around digital transformation, Mercedes-Benz is basing its endeavours on "open innovation". Stakeholders from all different industries – business, research, art, industry or biology – are brought together for shared research purposes. The results are projects which consider the future of mobility from new perspectives and which produce exceptional problem-solving approaches. Mercedes-Benz presented some of these collaborative projects at the FutureInsight event in Berlin.A future with autonomous vehiclesHow do we establish trust between humans and machines? Autonomous driving is going to be an integral part of our future. When it comes to this topic, Mercedes-Benz regards empathy and trust as central factors for the success and acceptance of the transformation. The concept of "informed trust" takes on great importance here: "People need to be able to quickly and reliably gauge what an autonomous vehicle is going to do next. The vehicle must therefore provide information about its intentions in a way that people can grasp immediately and intuitively," says Alexander Mankowsky, a futurologist at Daimler. Based on this information, the person needs to be able to decide what they are going to do and how they are going to respond to the situation. Among other innovations at FutureInsight, for this purpose Mercedes-Benz introduced concepts for a "cooperative vehicle". Projects with external providers demonstrate further possibilities for how future autonomous vehicles could communicate and work together with their surroundings.