How Käthe Kollwitz might approach Computer Science

These boxes… they call them ‘computers.’ And this ‘science’… it builds them. I look at the faces of the children, their eyes vacant, not with hunger for bread, but for… connection? For a world beyond the glowing screens. They say these machines can calculate, can hold infinite knowledge. But what knowledge? The knowledge of how to earn a crust, how to keep a roof over one's head, how to shield a child from the biting wind?

I see the sweat on the brow of the man who builds these intricate things, the tired lines around his eyes. Is his labor valued? Is he fed well, his family cared for? Or is he merely another cog, his strength drained for the profit of another, his life spent in service to a machine he may never truly understand? The child's hunger is a political fact, and I fear this new ‘science’ may conjure new hungers, new forms of a hollow existence.

They speak of speed, of efficiency. But for what end? If this speed serves only to widen the gulf between the few who possess and the many who toil, then it is a swift path to further despair. One must show the pain, so that it is no longer hidden. If this science can be used to lighten the burdens of those who suffer, to give voice to the voiceless, to truly improve the lot of the working mother, then perhaps there is value. But if it merely creates new masters, new chains invisible as air, then it is a darkness I cannot embrace. I want to be of use, and I ask, to whom is this ‘computer science’ truly of use?

Imagined perspective — an AI synthesis grounded in Käthe Kollwitz’s recorded ideas and methods, not a quotation or a statement they actually made.