Torsten Reil
speaker
213 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Torsten Reil’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And what we did from the beginning at Helsing is we made a commitment to ourselves, but also to the outside world that we would take ethics really seriously. There are two reasons for it. One of them is as a company that's based in democratic countries, we believe we have a special responsibility to think about ethics and how our technology is used and who we make it available to.
Secondly, we want to attract, we want to be a broad church, we want to attract all kinds of different people with different political views, backgrounds, etc. And to accommodate those people, you need to give everyone in the company the commitment that we think together carefully about the pros and cons of certain decisions.
Decisions always have to be made eventually by the founders, but the decision process, you can include everyone. And that's what we've done from the beginning. So we have many ethics workshops, which are extremely well attended. We now have to break them up into several subgroups. What ethical elements come up that you did not expect to come up?
First of all, even the complexity around who do you sell it to is interesting because they're very obvious ones that we'll all agree on. But then there are ones in between which are... Sorry, who do we agree on?
Yeah, for example, that we would agree on. And then there are others where it becomes a bit more complex. One of the main reasons we do these workshops is that we get everyone to contribute to the decision process, but also for everyone to build what we call this ethics muscle. Because for me, everything was kind of, there were red lines, everything was black and white and it was kind of easy.
The more you dive into a particular topic, the harder actually it becomes to make these calls and the more complex it becomes. And that is something that we didn't just want to decide kind of in a small group of people or some small ethics group. We wanted everyone to contribute to it so that everyone had buy-in and understood the pros and cons.
Not everyone may agree with the decisions that we eventually take, but everyone can see how we arrived at those decisions. What decision did you take that was most unpopular? I don't think decisions have been particularly unpopular yet. We just recently announced that we are building strike drones. We built strike drone software as well.
And that is fraught with all kinds of complexities that you have to think about around the ethics side of it, both in terms of technology usage, how it's used, et cetera. And that is something that everyone contributed to the thinking around this. We managed to shine a light on
areas of technology development that i can't go into sadly that actually we probably didn't think about that much before so the other important part is that if you have a lot of i think intelligent engaged people look at the ethics problem around technology usage con ops and the concept of operations you just shine a light on kind of any kind of remaining area and so you just have much better coverage of all the questions that you have to do before we go to this very important news so you don't sell to those three who are the ambiguous like who's the like
Well, the easiest way to look at clear and not clear is to check out the Economist Democracy Index. That's what we used initially. The Economist Democracy Index. Exactly. So the Economist releases a list every year and it ranks countries according to how democratic they are, with 10, I believe, being the highest one, going down to zero. And so the ones at the top are easy.
The ones at the bottom are also easy. And then it starts becoming more complex in the middle because you have some countries, even in the EU, where in the past they haven't been
kind of ranked that highly but then governments have changed and they've ranked more highly again so it basically becomes a moving target and then there are also considerations around are they parts or are these some of these countries that are maybe in the grain gray zone part of democratic alliances that become important for democracies to survive and protect themselves for example
I think these complexities are there with any conflict and eventually it becomes complex and there is no right or wrong. I'm always aware that this sounds like a cop-out and this is what I've always been afraid of is that when you say it's complex, it sounds like a cop-out, but it isn't a cop-out. It is actually complicated and complex.
And you also need to weight certain components in a way that can be arbitrary. And so every conflict, I think, has these kinds of complications, and it's our responsibility to navigate it. Again, we could just lean back and say there's export law that makes it really easy.
But I think if you want to have people really engaged with these kinds of technologies and capabilities in a company, you need to go further than that. You need to build a view that goes beyond just what is quite static export law.
Well, yeah, I mean, Helsing was founded to support Europe and to be a European company, also to be a European lighthouse company and a company that helps Europe protect itself. So that's always the number one thing. And if kind of people ask, like, what is it you want to, you know, where do you want to be in five years with Helsing or what is it you want to achieve? It's very simple.
We want to make Europe safer. We want to be able to point at the difference that we've made in terms of the geopolitical security of this continent. That is the goal of the company. Everything else has to follow from that.
Obviously, it needs to be a company that's large enough so that it has leverage, that it can deploy a lot of equipment, that it can work with some of the most complex systems like the Eurofighter that we're working on. But that's all it means to an end. The goal is always to protect Europe.
Yeah, I mean, Helsing is a software company, as a software-first company, always has been and always will be. Almost everyone is a software engineer. That's where we've come from. That's how we hired. And we are in a number of large contracts. For example, we are working with Saab on the Eurofighter electronic warfare upgrade program. That's pure software, our contribution.
And software can make a massive difference. In this particular case, AI can. because we can start to read the intent of shape-shifting anti-aircraft radar systems. And so software plays a huge role, and we always said it creates a 10x multiplier in terms of capabilities. That's still the case, that will always be the case, and we will always do those software programs.
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