Gergely Réti: I welcome everyone to this very special event with great appreciation and respect. I extend a special welcome to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Professor Ferenc Krausz. Thank you very much for being here with us today. The goal of MCC [Mathias Corvinus Collegium] is to educate young people who, through their talent and hard work, will serve the success of the Hungarian nation. As a former student of MCC I’m personally delighted to have the opportunity to talk with the following outstanding achievers about public life, academia, science, Hungarian talent and the intersections between these. Prime Minister, you graduated from ELTE Faculty of Law in 1987 and studied philosophy at Oxford. In addition to your university studies, you were also a member of Bibó István College. My question to you is this: How do you look back on your university years, and what did you gain during that time that you can use today?
I’d also like to welcome you all. Thank you very much for being here. Congratulations to all those whose work receives tribute in this building and the intellectual workshop operating in it. I also thank the Professor for the opportunity to meet again. It is a pleasure to come here, finally to a building in this city that was not built by the Bishop. Lately I’ve got used to the idea that if something happens in Szeged, it’s somehow related to the Catholic Church. I’m glad that now others have entered this competition in urban development. As for my memories, I was lucky, because I had good teachers. I think that the quality of your university years is determined by whether you’re lucky enough to be in the hands of good teachers. And I was lucky. This was related, by the way, to the great change that was about to occur, but no one understood exactly what was happening; everyone simply understood that something was happening. This was in the mid-1980s, and you could tell that there was no way this communist system would last. There were various opinions: whether it was going to stay for another fifteen years, or ten, or three. I was one of those who believed the latter, and I’d have forced the matter. But everyone felt that something new was coming, and so there was an intellectual buzz in universities everywhere – so not just in the law faculty, but in the economics faculty, everywhere. The specialist colleges came into being at that time, and you felt that something was happening there that you had to be involved in, that you had to understand. And we had bright teachers, young, enthusiastic teachers, who helped us to understand, thinking together with them, what was going to happen here, and – having understood it – whether we’d have any role to play in it. Would we need to do something, would we need to become part of it, or would we need to guide events? I remember this period as a very vibrant and very inspiring time – we’re talking about the period between 1984 and 1990. Once Gyula Tellér – God rest his soul! – was in a similar conversation with me, and I told him what a great time it was. He told me to stop saying such things, because I’d end up making the late communist days sound attractive. Because in reality it wasn’t that inspiring. What was inspiring was that it was about to end, and one could work to end it. I grew up in a very special period, and in these conversations, in the ongoing workshops over four or five years, in talking to my teachers, I acquired a considerable part of what I know today, what drives me today, and what I think about life. I’ll name names. For example László Kéri – whose name will provoke the audience a little – shares responsibility for my sitting here; or István Stumpf, whose name you may know; or Tamás Fellegi. So there were a lot of young teachers who cared about us, and I’m grateful to them that I’m still able, at this mature age, to follow the changes and events in the world; because that’s where I learned how to think about, how to understand, what’s happening around us. So I can tell you that it was a time that will not return, and there will be no more of that. I’m glad I was able to be there, and there will be no more communism, so that there will be nothing left to overthrow.
Gergely Réti: Professor, you also studied at ELTE, then at Budapest Technical University, and finally you obtained your PhD in Vienna. Who were the influences on you, and what were the first inspirations for you, a future Nobel Prize-winning scientist?
Ferenc Krausz: First of all, I’d like to echo the Prime Minister in expressing my great thanks for being invited here. It’s a great honour for me to be at the same table as the Prime Minister to discuss important matters. I’d like to congratulate Mathias Corvinus Collegium on this wonderful facility, and I’d also like to thank the City of Szeged, Hungary, and – perhaps on behalf of future generations – the Hungarian government for the fact that resources are now available for projects like this. I believe that this is the investment that will pay the best dividends for the future of Hungary. So this is an extremely good decision, and I’d encourage the Government to implement as many such projects as possible in the coming period. To answer your question, that was an extremely exciting period. In fact, back in the 1980s I think only a year or two separated my university studies from those of the Prime Minister. Teachers, of course, are central to how you develop, and I was fortunate enough to learn what would eventually become the central area of my career – physics – from two world-renowned teachers. And perhaps it’s not an exaggeration to say that I learned from two of the best physics teachers in the world: Károly Simonyi at the Budapest University of Technology and György Marx at ELTE. So the guidance they gave me has helped me to this day to do my job to the highest possible standard. At the same time, for me that period was also rendered very beautiful by, for example, the absence of social media. So compared to today it was much easier to actually withdraw and concentrate on my work. I didn’t have to glance at my smartphone every minute to see if something of earth-shattering importance had just come in, to which I had to react at that very moment. So that wasn’t a challenge back then. Unfortunately, today I’d say that it’s a challenge for young people to withdraw for an hour or two, to concentrate and work. So I think that was a very fortunate situation. And at the end of such work there was a positive effect, because after our work the only social activity we had was to get together, go down to the basement of Schönherz College and play football until 2 a.m. So we were hardly able to crawl up to our rooms and go to lectures the next day after a few hours of sleep. So it was a fantastic time. I actually feel a little sorry for today’s generation, who unfortunately don’t work in that kind of way anymore.
It’s a great thing that the Professor has said positive things about me, because it’s very rare for someone from Mór to praise someone from Felcsút. We’re not fellow parishioners, but we’re from nearby areas. Perhaps we should add, Professor, that today it’s hard to imagine that when you wanted to meet someone, you weren’t able to just call them. So if you wanted to talk to someone you had to go to them, and they were either at home or not, at work or not. So the whole order of life, the whole dynamic of the world we lived in, was very different from what we see now. And of course there must be science that deals with this. But I feel that we may have known less, we had less knowledge, but what we knew, we knew deeply. So when we needed to talk, we had to go somewhere and we listened. So somehow the depth of understanding was quite different from the mindset we have now, when we’re surfing on a kind of sea of information. So when I talk to young people now, even my own children, I see that the way they put together what they want to say is different from the way we did. It’s difficult to express it well, but in order to make ourselves understood to them there’s a very big generational difference here that we have to tackle, because we’re the older ones. So we have to make an effort. This is what I feel. We have to pay attention to this, so that today’s 18-, 20- or 22-year-olds understand what the Devil I’m talking about. And it’s not because I’m saying something complicated: it’s because the way I’m delivering the information is different from the way we used to do it back in the eighties. Anyway, there were two important things: the communists had to fall, the Soviets had to go home. These were the two approaches – let’s say interdisciplinary approaches – that prevailed.
Gergely Réti: In an interview in 1988, the Prime Minister said that he wanted to be a good university teacher and teach political theory. Now you’re putting all this into practice, and you are being taught in universities. Why did you choose a career in politics instead of academia?
My mother is an educator, a retired educator – indeed she was a special needs teacher. She was a speech therapist and also worked with the mentally handicapped, so I know the deeper aspects of that profession quite well, and how to bring the most out of someone – even out of people in the most difficult of situations. It’s a fantastic thing to start dealing with it, and then six months later you see that someone can do things that six months earlier no one would have thought possible. So because of my mother that’s what motivated me. And my father, my father is an engineer. I remember when we were driving in our Trabant on the outskirts of Brno [in Czechoslovakia] sometime in the 1970s, the early ‘‘70s, I just heard the engineer saying that things were different back home: that some bridge or other had something or other, or the edge of the road was different. So I kept hearing how what I could see somewhere else should be brought home, and done better at home than where I saw it originally. So I received an impulse that was always about more than myself. I wasn’t told to be a good surgeon, or whatever, and carry out operations skilfully, or to be a good scientist; but that somehow what I would do should have a direct benefit. So I’ve always fluctuated between doing something – implementing something – and being intellectually inventive. I was tempted by both worlds: the intellectual element and the action-based element. This is how I was in the 1980s. I thought that if we couldn’t somehow teach the communists how to behave or sweep them aside, then in the world they called the communist world, the freest place to exist was probably in science. And since my thinking was human-oriented, and I was interested in politics, I somehow imagined myself in the area of political science. We thought and talked a lot about this. So it’s no accident that István Stumpf later became the State Secretary heading the Prime Minister’s Office in our first government, that my university colleague is now the Speaker of the House, that the former President of the Republic was also a Bibó College student, and that Professor Szájer was leader of our parliamentary group in the European Parliament. They were all people with an interest in political theory, to whom – after we’d thought everything through, read the books and learnt what we could – God gave us the opportunity to suddenly be able to do what we’d learnt. Because, after all, what happened was that in 1990 there were free elections, we got into Parliament, we fought our way into Parliament, and then suddenly we had to build a civic state to replace the failed communist state. We had to do this through legislation, and we were there in the middle of events. This exerted an attraction on us: it sucked us in, drew us in, and from then on we all abandoned the idea of being scientists and teaching. Because there was an opportunity to do it: not to read about it, but to do it. And it’s kept me in politics ever since. This is how I became a subject for study – and given various labels, not all of them elegant. There are less elegant labels for the discipline, but this is, after all, how we became politicians. I don’t know whether that would have been our choice if we’d grown up in a world as stable as the one in which young people find themselves now; but at the time we were in such a strong current that it was almost impossible to think about it very much – and by the time I’d thought of the answer I was already in it. So in the first election in 1990 we got support of between 9 and 10 per cent. The young democracy needed young democrats – that was the public consensus, and that’s why we were sent into the Parliament. And as we’d been sent in, we were determined to do a good job. This is how we got started in this profession or vocation, and this is how I ended up here, arguing alongside the professor.
Gergely Réti: Professor, did you ever think about using the huge amount of energy required for publishing and research in another area of life, or was your path straight and clear?
Ferenc Krausz: I didn’t think about it, and my story can be summarised much more briefly. I had a primary school physics teacher who, in fact, by the way he was able to explain the subject, aroused my interest so much that by the age of about thirteen or fourteen it became obvious that physics would have to play some role in my later life. And then during my university years this kind of suspicion became a certainty. It was the professors I mentioned earlier – Professors Károly Simonyi and György Marx – and a number of other world-renowned, world-class lecturers, who led me to the certainty that physics would play not just a minor role in my career, but a major role. From then on, the only thing that was really left open was – to quote my idol Professor Ernő Rubik – finding the right question.
Gergely Réti: Thank you very much. We often hear that, although talent blazes its own trail, it’s important to have a supportive social environment to help it flourish. Prime Minister, what do you think are the most important factors enabling talent to flourish, and in what ways can the Government help?
It’s difficult to say. The first time I heard the name of Professor Krausz was at a government meeting. I’ll reveal this secret now – but without names, because I don’t want to embarrass anyone. At this government meeting a minister said that a Professor Krausz would become a Nobel laureate. To this another minister, who was known to be a rival of the first minister, said something about what he’d do if he became a Nobel laureate. And then I noted down that sooner or later this question would be decided. It was then that I realised we had a physicist called Krausz somewhere in Germany, who, according to the contradictory opinions of the ministers, would sooner or later become a Nobel laureate. What I’m trying to say is that you never know what will emerge from the chrysalis. So it’s difficult to say how a talent will ultimately be fulfilled. And I don’t think it’s something that needs to be overanalysed. It’s like hardware and software: you need schools, you need teachers, you need good conditions to get people interested in what they’re studying. This is a task for the state, I think. And that’s pretty much as far as we go. Because in some mysterious way the question is whether God has implanted some ambition in a student. And if He has, then something will come of it. If not, something will still emerge – but just not that. That person will still be useful, but won’t excel. So some enigmatic, mysterious, 24-hour restlessness, vibrancy, curiosity, some insatiable hunger: that’s what you need, otherwise you’ll be mediocre. Mediocrity – and I’m using this term in a negative context – is also a very fine thing: mediocrity is reliability, predictability, and something which is greatly needed in a society. The best people, however, must not be stuck in mediocrity, but must somehow be taken out of it by this restlessness. And I think this is true of all talent – whether we’re talking about physics, sport or politics. It’s not we who decide, but God. The question is, once one has experienced this, whether things will be set in motion, whether or not one will submit to this feeling. Whoever turns their back on this, chooses comfort, prefers to relax, becomes lukewarm and squanders the talent given by God, will not excel. But once one submits to it, for whatever reason, because of parents, a teacher or God, it will somehow transport one, won’t it?
Ferenc Krausz: Absolutely. Up to the stars!
It will take one up to great heights. This is how it is. This kind of talent can’t be moulded, but space can be opened up for it, it can be helped, and then released. This is why you should never be offended by talented people. Terrible things are said by gifted children. I’m involved in running a football academy, and sometimes I hear terrible things from very talented children there too. But that’s no problem, that’s how it is, you have to let it go. And in my experience it will still take wings. I’m very glad that I have a job that’s allowed me to see a lot of that. So I’ve been able to help a lot of people indirectly – for example, by being involved in strengthening MCC, or doing things that have ended up producing talent. So I’ve been trying to do the “hardware” part. But we should realise that some mysterious inner element is needed for what we’re talking about: the Nobel Prize and great things.
Gergely Réti: Professor, you also have considerable international experience. What do you see as the differences between Hungarian and Western European university and research opportunities, and what could Hungary do to ensure that as many of our talented people as possible can work in Hungary in the future and contribute to the development of our country?
Ferenc Krausz: Wow, how much time do I have to answer that? This is a very, very substantial question, but I’ll try to go through the important parts of it in a structured way. I’d like to start with what are the important parts of growing up in the field of science, and what phases have to be gone through by someone who wants to become a great scientist and innovator. Obviously, the first stage is primary education, primary school, secondary school, then university, and then a PhD – which includes research, and then the continuation of that. So there are three relatively distinct stages. And then to come back to the question of how we’re doing. I think it’s worth putting comparison with the best into this structure. I’ll start with the good news, and then the not-so-good news. The good news is that, in the middle of it, despite the enormous efforts of the last ten or twenty years in university education, the resources here aren’t quite at the same level as, say, Stanford or Harvard University. Nevertheless they’re world-class – thanks to the many outstanding university teachers we have. Incidentally, we’re in a very good place here: Szeged is one of our higher education strongholds, with excellent teachers and excellent researchers. So I think that this is the phase in which we’re absolutely competitive at the moment. And I think that this can be further improved thanks to the change in the university model, which gives universities the opportunity to focus autonomously on where they see themselves as really competitive, to focus their resources there and make them even more competitive in comparison with international counterparts. So here we’re doing very well. In the area of basic education, I hope you don’t see me as a killjoy if I make a criticism. I think there are serious problems with the curricula. By the way, it’s perhaps a consolation – even if only a meagre one – that this isn’t a Hungarian phenomenon, but unfortunately a European one. So, for example, you can’t be internationally competitive if you start by lumping all the life and physical sciences into one subject, and then within that you drip in a little bit of physics, a little bit of biology and a little bit of chemistry. Thanks to this, we still have huge talents coming out of elementary education, which we see, of course, in the International Science Olympiads. And this year, thanks be to God, our mathematicians have also done extremely well. They’re actually saved by their excellent, world-class teachers. So, thank God, the successors of the “little old teachers” are still here among us, nurturing these talents – despite the fact that unfortunately the curriculum doesn’t provide the optimum conditions for this. So I think that there’s serious work to be done there. But as I say, the good news is that we have teachers of extraordinary ability and willingness. And incidentally we’d like to bring these teachers together and develop a major nationwide effort in the most important areas for the future, in the natural sciences, to develop a concept that will bring even better things out of the best, and develop talent as effectively as possible in this first, critical period – especially between the ages of 14 and 18. And then comes the third stage. This is the most problematic, because if we’re responsible for the fate of our best people, we must advise them that once they’ve acquired the basic knowledge in which Hungarian universities offer them excellent opportunities, then hopefully by then they’ll have started to develop an interest in the direction in which they’re going. And then, once they have that, they should look for a research centre where they can find one of the best research groups in the world in the particular field in which the young graduate student has – to quote Ernő Rubik again – found the right question for him or her, and to go there and acquire the highest possible level of knowledge. And our best people are doing this, which is a very good thing, but the bad thing is that these research groups are predominantly based abroad. And even worse, a significant percentage of these research groups are led by world-renowned researchers of Hungarian origin, more than 90 per cent of whom are working abroad. So I believe that the great challenge for the coming period is to bring back home as many of these researchers as possible. Under their leadership we should establish knowledge centres here in Hungary that are capable of conducting cutting-edge research and which, through this cutting-edge research, are essentially capable of making groundbreaking discoveries and developing disruptive technologies, which are in fact the basis of our future.
Can I contribute some thoughts on this?
Gergely Réti: Of course!
Perhaps what I want to say is that serious things are created from the ideas of clever people. How did the KEKVAs [public trust funds] come into being? Universities here are governed by boards of trustees. They came into being because I once visited György Oláh in America, who was a Hungarian Nobel Prize-winner, a Nobel laureate in chemistry. And since he used to come to Hungary from time to time, I asked him what he thought was the difference between doing research there in Los Angeles and doing research at home, and what he thought should be done. And he explained to me, if I understood correctly, that Hungarian universities were isolated. They existed in a world of their own, not plugged into an ecosystem – perhaps this is the modern term – from which they ought to be able to draw their life force. For example, I asked him why he didn’t bring his inventions home, and he explained it to me. I told him that was why I was there, and I’d buy them all. Back then his scientific aim was to try to produce energy from carbon dioxide, and the Chinese were buying huge numbers of licences from him. I told him what a good thing I thought that was, and suggested we look for areas where Hungary could make headway: “Here’s this great thing, and you, Professor, are the father of it all. Come home, we’ll help you, let’s do it.” He said it would be good, but the ownership and utilisation rights for all his discoveries were with the university. Because somehow they were funded by a kind of company–university collaboration; they weren’t in his hands but mostly in the university’s hands, and so he couldn’t help with that. But he could explain why they do it that way. And if I’m not wrong, they might do something like that over there. I’m just telling you this because a thought like this from people who have had success is very helpful. I feel the same way now about the professor. I’m trying to negotiate on this. I don’t know whether I’m allowed to talk about this, to negotiate with the professor to help us with what he described: about the fact that if we have so many excellent researchers abroad, and they’re in foreign research institutes, why we don’t have at least four or five here at home; and about where the next Nobel Prize hopefuls – or perhaps even more than that – could be doing research here at home. Because it’s not a question of money. Of course, at first glance, a large sum of money needs be put down, but that’s not really the issue: it’s how the state can get a guarantee that if it puts down such a sum, it won’t be a wacky experiment, but something that has an outcome and will ultimately produce some results. We’re talking to the professor about this, and I hope that he succeeds – something like when, after my conversation with Professor Oláh I sat down with Professor Pálinkás. Since then, of course, Professor Pálinkás has gone wild politically, and is now employing his skills in a completely different sphere. But you’ll remember that it was he who, as a result of this idea, introduced the Momentum Programme. So we must give Professor Pálinkás credit for many things, because as President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences he brought in the Momentum Programme – which, I think, has brought many young people home and brought them closer to Hungarian science. So I just want to say that government is often imagined as a factory: somehow some raw material is put in at the beginning, it goes through, and then at the end it becomes a programme. This isn’t the case. The way to do great things is to look for successful Hungarians anywhere in the world and ask them if they have any advice for us that we could implement. And then things will get done. Speaking of the education system, I have the same problem, because everyone’s saying – as in broad terms the professor has said – that there are problems with the basic curricula and the way they’re divided by scientific discipline, and how these are linked together. So now I’ve asked holders of the Corvin Chain to convene – not as educational experts, but as the most outstanding living representatives of Hungarian intellect – and give the Government a bird’s-eye view of what’s wrong with the whole, rather than with the details. If there’s a problem, then they should let us know where the global problem is, and where we should intervene. I believe that the Government should act not only as a factory, but should take the impulses from talent that already exists. But the professor is right to say that it’s also a question of money. I’ve written down here that in terms of the amount of money spent on innovation we’re now 21st out of 27 in the European Union. If this is the year of the breakthrough, the plan is to be in the top 10 in Europe in innovation by 2030 – and there’s a plan to be in the top 10 in the world by 2040. These are big plans, and they also have budgetary implications, but I’ve only given the figures to give a sense of a trend or a perspective. In Hungary there’s a general consensus that without this, if we don’t make this breakthrough in the field of science, we won’t be able to compete in the modern world – or perhaps even survive. I’ve written a lot more here, but let’s get on with it, because I’m taking time away from the professor.
Ferenc Krausz: My spontaneous, brief reaction is that I have very, very good news, because I believe that Hungary’s in an exceptional position to actually perform a miracle in this area. This is because we have the scientists with whom we can do this; so we don’t have to invent them – because you can’t just invent such scientists and create them by snapping one’s fingers. So we have them, and we actually have living examples of how it can be done. It’s a combination of, say, a German and a Chinese example. The German example is the Max Planck Society, and there the big secret there is that the Max Planck directors are actually given complete freedom: they get a grant of 2–2.5 million euros a year, and they can basically do more or less what they think is reasonable with it. Obviously, every few years there’s an evaluation and they’re checked on to see if they’re doing their job to the right standard. That’s natural, but apart from that they have complete freedom. And the result is that in the past six years the Max Planck Society has supplied five Nobel Prize-winners. Five Nobel Prize-winners in the past six years! And there’s also the best practice of how to bring back home world-class, world-leading researchers from abroad – who are so embedded that they can’t even be bombed out – to do important and groundbreaking work in their own countries. China has found a solution to this, giving world-class scientific leaders working abroad the opportunity to spend 30 to 40 per cent of their time at home every year: not communicating via zoom and other channels, but physically in the country, building up a team and a knowledge centre. Then they’re provided with support that’s practically of Max Planck standard or perhaps even above it, with fabulous salaries. So the Chinese are giving the best scientists in the world salaries that we only see in the world of football. So basically it’s…
...there must be order in the world.
Ferenc Krausz: That’s right, so they’re starting to put the world to rights. And in practice the concept that I’d like to present to the Prime Minister in the next few weeks – if we get the chance – is, in short, actually a combination of the two. This will be complemented by a talent management programme, of which we have a unique example here in Hungary. The National Academy of Scientist Education has built this up over the last ten or so years, starting from here in Szeged, and still with a Szeged centre in the field of biomedical sciences. They’ve created a model for finding talent in this field and, year after year, step by step, to select the best children from the relatively large number who show a basic interest, and to accompany and develop these best ones with a mature concept. This is a world sensation, and the methodology has been published in Nature Medicine, which is one of the leading journals in the field of medicine. As part of this programme Nobel Prize-winners come here and give regular lectures to high school students. So this is an absolute Hungaricum that I think we can be proud of. The interesting thing is that I’ve started to organise a foundation in the field of mathematics, physics and computer science: the MatFiz Foundation. This is in the process of being set up, and we’ve been meeting with the best physics and maths teachers to see how we can create a concept to make the best even better. And then I invited Professor Péter Hegyi – who’s one of the creators of this concept – to present it. Then my colleagues looked at me and said, “How is it that we don’t know about this?” So this was in the field of biomedical science, too. I had excellent representatives from mathematics, physics and IT sitting next to me – in Hungary this is the example – but the representatives of other fields didn’t know about it. So we don’t really want to proclaim our great innovations here. This concept has already been tried and tested, it works excellently and it’s admired all over the world, even in Asia. In the new foundation we’d like to transfer it to the field of mathematics, physics and IT, and combine it with the concept of bringing the best people home and creating knowledge centres around them. And from then on, if this is successful, it would be absolutely no problem for these young people to come here at the end of their university studies and say they’ll go to Harvard or Stanford or Oxford and do their PhD there. If there are world-class knowledge centres here in Hungary with which they’re already in contact, and if mentors from there guide them on their way, and if the work being done here is of such a high standard that they – these are our best – have the chance to make a big difference, then they’ll come back. They’ll come back in large numbers. So these individual outstanding scientists here will be a magnet for bringing back our brightest young people. No other strategy can work. We can spend all the money in the world on infrastructure, on the best equipment, on beautiful science palaces; but if we don’t have world-leading scientists in the areas in which we want to make progress, we’ll lose our most talented young people. So this is the key to everything, and this is actually the concept that the Prime Minister will soon be presented with. The essence of the concept is to create what is effectively a Max Planck Society in Hungary, but with, say, less than 5 per cent of Max Planck’s 3-billion-euro budget. This miracle can be done without actually needing an institutional system here, because we have them here, we have our excellent universities, we have the HUN–REN institutional system. Both of these have such a degree of freedom under the recent reforms that they have every opportunity to consciously focus existing resources where they’re already either competitive or close to being so: where it’s most worthwhile to invest additional resources. So this infrastructure is there. And in fact under the new concept the additional resources that are needed would be 100 per cent available for researchers. So not for maintaining infrastructure, not for running a large organisation, which accounts for three quarters of the Max Planck Society’s budget, but entirely for the researchers.
Can I…
Gergely Réti: Of course!
...continue this or contribute to it? We’re talking about a lot of money. The question is, do Hungarians need it at all? So the question one should ask is why the Hungarians want to be present in the science at a high level, or whether it’s enough to send our talented people abroad, and then through them be able to add what we know to the world, without Hungary needing to nurture its own talent independently and achieve world-class results here. Why is this necessary? We need an argument, because when we spend taxpayers’ money, we need a clear answer to why this makes sense – beyond the fact that some scientists can fulfil their own talent. And our argument, the argument of the current government – let’s say the national government – is that science is indispensable to the survival of the nation. And this isn’t because it produces a material productive force that will later be used in the economy – because either it will or it won’t. It’s because, due to the storms of history, we’re a nation in a situation and of a size – a nation of ten million or so – which must constantly prove its right to exist. If we don’t do that, we’ll quite simply be devoured, be outpopulated, overrun: something will happen to us, but they’ll certainly take our talented people away, so we’ll quite simply fall apart. So if we want to retain the cultural quality of what we might call Hungarian civilisation, which has a known continuity of one thousand one hundred years, then we must be present where the world’s greatest minds are working. We cannot dominate, because there aren’t that many of us. Of course one or two of our brains can still do that, but we won’t dominate the world in terms of numbers. Yet one area where Hungarians have a right to exist on the basis of their achievements is in science, and we must constantly prove this. I believe that we also have this to do in culture and in sport, but science is another such area. Therefore for us, for the survival of the community, we have to be among the best in the world in science. This isn’t obvious to everyone, but it’s obvious to me. If we aren’t among the best in the world, then slowly we’ll not only drop out of the ranks, but our entire culture, our country, our nation, will somehow fall out of favour, flatten out and slowly assimilate and disappear. So we need scientific achievement if we want to survive in the cultural quality which only we Hungarians have – because there’s no one else in it, because we’re the only ones who are. And this is the decisive reason we need to spend money on science, even beyond our means: so that we can perform in this segment for the survival of the nation and the community. This is a key issue. Whether our scientists understand this is another question. It would be good if everyone understood it. This isn’t an easy thing to do, but it’s important for scientists to be aware that the Hungarian community is actually punching above its weight in trying to create opportunities to get something back – not simply in the results of scientific research, but by placing Hungarians, and scientists, on a level in the world that’s worthy of us and that makes us who we are. It would be good for scientists to feel this, and it might even give them extra motivation. So I’d be happy if we could bring these people back to Hungary, and if it were clear that this connection, this recognition, this calling – which, either voluntarily or involuntarily, is the calling of every Hungarian scientist, beyond their profession – contributes to the survival of our community. This cannot be taught: it must be lived here, it comes from the heart. When you come home, you probably understand it, and then all the energy invested on the government side will have been worth it. This is our hope, and this is why we’re talking to the professor like this about great things like those that we’ve heard here.
Gergely Réti: If you’ll allow me, I’d like to go into a slightly different area. Whether we like it or not, artificial intelligence and its various manifestations have an impact on our lives. This is a question to both of you: Do you see this as a threat or an opportunity? Prime Minister, please.
I don’t know anything about that, so we’ll have to ask the professor.
Ferenc Krausz: I think that this isn’t an either-or situation, but that it’s actually both: it can be dangerous, depending on who gets hold of it; and of course it has enormous potential. I’d put the danger in the category of terrorism: if terrorists start to systematically use artificial intelligence for various purposes, it could certainly pose a serious threat to society. But that isn’t a threat in Hungary – thank God, and thanks to prudent policies. So I think it’s true that in Hungary in particular, positive opportunities overwhelmingly predominate, and I think it was an extremely good decision by the Prime Minister to appoint a government commissioner for this area – and not just any government commissioner. Perhaps I could make a small criticism…
I’m listening.
Ferenc Krausz: We’ve succeeded in appointing someone who should never have been let go for a minute.
Well, it’s not that easy, yes...
Ferenc Krausz: Yes, that may be, but it’s great that he’s back. Why is this important? It’s important because artificial intelligence is already affecting many areas of our lives: science, technology, technology development, many areas of our lives. And it will do so even more in the future. And there are very different needs for artificial intelligence and algorithm development. And I think that it’s very, very important and useful that these various projects, which are being launched to solve various tasks, are monitored by someone at the top, and that someone at the top ensures that they talk to each other from time to time. Because the solutions themselves, the development of algorithms, can be very similar to the solution of two very different problems, and the two teams working on them may not actually know very much about each other because they’re working in such different areas. So we’ll have someone who can see through all this, what’s happening in Hungary in this field, and how to bring these experts and project teams together from time to time, so that they can exchange ideas, tell each other what the others are doing, and discover that what others are doing can be useful for them, then get together and work on it together. And in the end we’ll have something very useful in two completely different areas, and we can reach our goals much faster. So I think it was a very good and very important decision. And as for finding the person, well that’s a masterstroke...
I have two things to add on artificial intelligence. The first is that at a government meeting a long time ago when I asked him what artificial intelligence is, László Palkovics – who we’re actually covertly talking about – told me what it was. He told me not that one doesn’t need to get overwhelmed by it: the point is that you have to collect a lot of data, you have to ask a sensible question, and you get the answer. I said this means we jettison a lot of public administration. He said that it’s not as simple as that, but the point is that you can get rid of the mechanical aspects of work. So it does the work for you so that you can use your brainpower not in putting the technical data together, but in thinking conceptually about it. This is what I understood from what László said. On the other hand, I myself once stumbled into such an artificial intelligence situation. I had to give a lecture – perhaps sometime last year – on economic neutrality, in the context of the European Presidency here in Hungary. And then I told my colleague to tap something into this artificial intelligence thing and order something from it. I wanted a political speech written by AI: “Hungary’s economic neutrality”. It should be this long, radical in tone, uncompromising, clear and straightforward. That’s what I asked for. And I was given it, this thing was produced – in a matter of moments, in fact. And I read the text, and 80 per cent of it was fine. Only 20 per cent of it was stupid, or misleading, so just 20 per cent of it would have bombed. The other 80 was something I could have written. And then I started thinking, What am I here for? Or even: What’s the point of our profession? Why are we here? Or what will come of this? I don’t want to bore you with the answers I gave to these questions, but I think there are quite a few very tough questions that AI raises in relation to many professions: Is what you’re doing necessary, is it needed in this way? If someone, artificial intelligence, is doing this instead of you, don’t you have to do something else, to reorganise? I think about this a lot, and now when Minister Palkovics returns I’ll get new impulses. But it’s certain that the political profession will change a lot in the world of communication, of communicating with people, of communicating and explaining ideas. This will also be a challenge for us, because there is indeed a problem here, and that is the problem of opening the door to mediocrity. Because if I can get 80 per cent of a speech written at a good level of quality by a computer, then we’re like journalists. I don’t want to stray into other areas, but the way things have gone is that if you have a modern phone like this, then you’re a journalist. That’s what’s happened to that profession. You have one of these modern mobile phones, you pick it up, you say three sentences on it and it’s news. And you put it on some platform and it works there. So we, as decision-makers and politicians, need to think about how artificial intelligence will reshape our profession – not in technical terms, but in terms of substance. I may not be the one to think about it, but the young people who come after us will need to think about it.
Ferenc Krausz: By the way, a further challenge in this regard, and I fully agree with the Prime Minister, is that we’re facing enormous challenges here. I think that one of the great challenges is how to integrate artificial intelligence into education in such a way that it appears as positive, as a positive element, and its role is not to do students’ homework. So here the curriculum and the teachers are faced with an extraordinary challenge, to come up with tasks and challenges for the students that don’t have a simple solution from AI, or that are easily recognisable when the solution comes from AI. This is a huge challenge, and it’s what we’re facing.
Gergely Réti: I still have a lot of questions, but unfortunately we’re at the end of our time. I’d like to thank the Prime Minister and the Professor for an excellent discussion, thank you all for your attention, and wish you further enriching moments here.
Thank you very much.
Ferenc Krausz: Thank you very much.