Interview with Peter Mertens and Wolfgang König: “From Reasonable Automation to (Sustainable) Autonomous Systems”

Beck, Roman; Dibbern, Jens; Wiener, Martin (2022). Interview with Peter Mertens and Wolfgang König: “From Reasonable Automation to (Sustainable) Autonomous Systems”. Business & Information Systems Engineering 2022, 64(3), pp. 311-315. Springer 10.1007/s12599-022-00753-z

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Peter Mertens is Professor Emeritus of Wirtschaftsinformatik at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität (FAU) Erlangen-Nürnberg. After studying industrial engineering, he completed his doctoral studies and his habilitation at the TH Darmstadt (1961) and the TU München (1966), respectively. From 1966 to 1968, he worked for a large software and consulting firm in Switzerland, first as a system designer and later as a managing director. In 1968, Peter Mertens took over the first chaired professorship specialized in business data processing at the University of Linz. He is considered one of the founding fathers of Wirtschaftsinformatik in the German-speaking world. Until September 2005, Peter Mertens held the Chair of Business Administration, especially Wirtschaftsinformatik I at the Faculty of Business and Social Sciences of FAU. In parallel, he was head of the computer science research group “Business Applications” at FAU’s Faculty of Engineering. Since fall 2005, he works as an emeritus professor at his former chair. Peter Mertens is the author of numerous books, including 23 monographs. He has also been involved in the editing of 26 collective works. The first volume of his book “Integrated Information Processing” has been published in 18 editions. Some of his books have been translated into English, Chinese, Italian, and Russian. Among other awards, he is a Fellow of the German Informatics Society, an honorary doctor of five universities in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, and has been awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. From 1990 until 2000, Peter Mertens served as Editor-in-Chief for WIRTSCHAFTSINFORMATIK (now: BISE).

Until 2016, Wolfgang König was Professor of Business Administration, especially Information Systems and Information Management at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration of Goethe University Frankfurt a. M., and until January 2022, he was Chairman of the E-Finance Lab (since 2020: efl – the Data Science Institute) at Goethe University. Since 2008, he holds the position of Executive Director of the House of Finance of Goethe University, and since 2016, he serves as Senior Professor at Goethe University. From 1998 until 2008, König served as Editor-in-Chief for WIRTSCHAFTSINFORMATIK (now: BISE).

Both Peter Mertens and Wolfgang König are clearly among the research pioneers when it comes to automated systems, which can be seen as a precursor of the central topic of this special issue: autonomous systems (AS). The key difference between automated systems and AS is that, in AS, machines or other technology actors have at least some agency (i.e., they can act autonomously), whereas in automated systems, the agency still lies with humans – who, for example, define the relevant rule system – and machines/technologies merely automate the execution of these predefined rules.

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