Beating AI With Mozart

Could AI compose and perform like Mozart? Bernhard Kerres uses that question to show where artificial intelligence excels, in closed systems like medical imaging, and where it fails, in the open-ended judgment behind human connection, creativity, and leadership. A keynote with live music and a room-wide experiment. Recorded at the Global Peter Drucker Forum, 2019.

Published 2019-11-22 by Bernhard Kerres

Could artificial intelligence compose and perform a piece like Mozart? In this keynote, Bernhard Kerres uses that deceptively simple question to map where AI genuinely excels, where it fails, and why the most human parts of how we think, connect, and create remain out of its reach.

The talk moves from medical imaging and breast cancer detection, where AI already outperforms humans, to online dating, where it does not, and asks why. Along the way, Kerres runs a live experiment with the whole room, draws on neuroscience showing that music rewires the brain, and explains why a machine still cannot play a Viennese waltz. The throughline: AI is powerful inside closed systems with clear rules, but the open-ended judgment that defines great music, and great leadership, is a different kind of problem.

Featuring live flute performance by Daniela Mars.

Recorded at the Global Peter Drucker Forum 2019.