The human in the machine: Why Ruben Hetfleisch believes AI could make us more human again

Ruben Hetfleisch does not provoke, but his sentences linger. I experience him as none of those tech gurus who rave about the future with shining eyes. Rather someone who puts it under the microscope and asks himself what it is doing to us.

Born in 1995 in Frankfurt, a trained engineer, near-doctor, he researched generative AI at the Fraunhofer Austria Institute. For three years he tried to teach trust to machines. Until he decided that theory alone is not enough. Today, with his team in Vienna, he builds concrete AI solutions for industry and companies, precisely where it is not about buzzwords but about reality.

And yet the big question stays with him: How do machines change human beings?

Between doctoral thesis and being

Hetfleisch could have made a career, in the safe, academic sense. But in October 2025 he broke off his doctoral thesis.

“I don’t need the doctorate for my ego. I want to build something myself.”

Hetfleisch belongs to that generation which refuses to reproduce systems that are long outdated. “The education system is like a phone book with three pages,” he says dryly. “You learn the same thing as 30 years ago.”

What did he learn from it anyway? That you cannot learn the future by heart, but that you have to help build it.

The paradox of intelligence

When Hetfleisch talks about AI, it is never technical but anthropological:

“In an ideal world, AI ensures that we can be more human.”

But right now the exact opposite is happening, he says. Social media, he says, has long ceased to be a social medium. “AI turns social networks into even less social networks.” A sentence that hits home, and was already foreseeable. Because even the like-era had already turned the concept of friendship into a digital connection and given everyone the feeling of having to be in the right.

While algorithms entertain us, they wean us off real conversation, and thus off real attention as well. We lose the ability to bear contradiction, because digital mirrors always agree with us. Hetfleisch sees the danger clearly:

“The first point of contact for a young generation is no longer a human being, but ChatGPT.”

That sounds sober, but it is a cultural turning point. The machines listen to us, while we unlearn how to listen to one another.

From belief to credibility

Hetfleisch does not believe that AI deceives us, but that we are already well on the way to forgetting how knowledge can still be checked.

“Clemens Wasner (co-founder of AI Austria) once said that people used to believe every piece of information was correct until the opposite was proven. Today it is the other way around: everything is false until you can prove that it is true.”

This shift describes not only the internet age, but the tectonic shift of an entire culture. What remains when truth becomes probability? For Hetfleisch the answer is “transparency.” He calls for systems in which content is authenticatable. “It is not unrealistic that in the future we will have to verify our content with the help of an iris scan. What is certain is that the internet of the future will change massively.”

The new ethics of machines

Asked who will be responsible in the future (human or AI), Hetfleisch answers without hesitation: “Still us.”

AI agents, he says, will soon be part of our everyday life. We will no longer recognize them in video calls, no longer distinguish them in texts, yet responsibility remains a human capacity. In doing so he advocates for a human in the loop, a world in which decisions are not delegated but accompanied. A path that does not replace technology but extends it.

The greatest danger lies not in the intelligence of the machines, but in the complacency of those who operate them.

Europe, please wake up

“In the big horizontal AI technologies, we in Europe have fallen behind. But in the vertical use cases, that is, where expertise counts, we have a real chance.”

Sepp Hochreiter saw it similarly in our last conversation. Hetfleisch believes in a European AI that does not fight for market share, but for values: data protection, sustainability, responsibility. “We can turn our values into business,” he says. That sounds like idealism, but it is an economic strategy.

While the USA sells innovation, Europe could export integrity. An AI with an attitude, and thus a new path that has not been known in this way before.

The human as the destination of return

That Ruben Hetfleisch was only born in 1995 surprises me. In our conversation I encounter concentrated competence and a knowledge drawn from 100 years of understanding people. I experience him as a multilayered thinker who searches for the human being within the system and questions the future.

He believes that the future will not become more digital, but more permeable. That the human being does not disappear, but reinvents itself, as the conductor of its machines.

I believe that AI teaches us what humanity means.

I never wanted to know everything AI can do. I wanted to find out what it makes of us.