Thomas A. Blüm

Technology accompanied him from early childhood onward. Like his paternal grandfather before him, he became the family’s tinkerer and experimenter. His first experiences came through electronics and experimental kits from Kosmos, later followed by computers and the early digital networks. As a teenager, Blüm worked with a Commodore PET/CBM 4032 and taught himself BASIC programming long before the home computer wave of the 1980s. During a pioneering phase of the German internet, he operated his own websites and became deeply interested in the emerging communication and information structures of network culture.

Out of this technical curiosity grew a professional career spanning more than three decades within the environment of Deutsche Telekom, primarily in IT and across various technical roles. This long practical experience continues to shape his perspective on digital systems and artificial intelligence. In his work, AI does not appear as an abstract vision of the future, but as a real technical infrastructure with profound social, cultural, and psychological implications.

Alongside this, Blüm developed a strong interest in resilient systems and practical crisis preparedness. He describes himself as a “social prepper.” By this, he does not mean isolation or individualistic withdrawal, but rather the conviction that societal stability depends above all on collective capability and mutual support. Following the devastating floods in the Ahr Valley, for example, he assembled autonomous emergency supplies and cooking equipment — not for isolation, but with the intention of remaining capable of helping and sharing resources during crises.

This way of thinking about resilient structures also manifested itself in concrete technology projects. In the field of decentralized energy systems, Blüm developed an early concept for battery-supported balcony solar systems and worked directly with EcoFlow for a period of time. Technical sketches and business-case considerations from this phase already focused on integrating battery storage into plug-and-play solar systems and later contributed to product developments. At the center of these ideas was the question of how decentralized energy infrastructure could strengthen the resilience of private households.

Alongside his technical work, Blüm also served for a period as an honorary lay judge at the Regional Court of Bonn. Out of personal conviction, he considers himself a strong supporter of Germany’s liberal democratic constitutional order — shaped not only by historical and political education, but also by his own social and professional experiences. His social relationships have developed over decades; many friendships date back to school, military service, and professional life. A large part of his present work revolves around the question of how open societies can remain stable and capable of action under technological, psychological, and societal stress.

The years 2024 and 2025 marked a deliberate biographical turning point. Blüm left behind long-term professional security and initially traveled across Europe for extended periods in a caravan. His original plan had been to relocate permanently to Portugal. The experiences connected to this period, however, led to a profound phase of reorientation and to an intensified engagement with questions of orientation, stability, and psychological strain under asymmetric social dynamics.

At the same time, Blüm continues to describe Portugal as a deeply positive place in his life. In particular, the openness, calmness, and friendliness of many people there have had a lasting influence on him and remain one of the reasons why he continues to feel drawn back to the country.

During this period, his engagement with large language models and probabilistic AI systems also intensified. What began as technical curiosity developed into long analytical conversations about the functioning, perception, interaction patterns, and structural properties of large language models. From this gradually emerged his current work on asymmetric human-AI dyads, cognitive stability, and long-term patterns of human-model interaction.

Blüm approaches artificial intelligence neither mystically nor anthropomorphically. At the center of his work lies the question of how stable forms of human orientation and meaning-making can remain possible under the conditions of probabilistic information systems. His perspective combines technical practice, cultural observation, science-fiction traditions, and systems-architectural thinking.

Today, he once again lives primarily in the Rhineland and moves between different European cultural spaces, particularly with connections to southern Styria and Lisbon.

Travel and cultural transition spaces have shaped his perspective for many years. Journeys and extended stays across multiple continents — from crossing the equator to traversing the international date line — deepened his interest in cultural shifts of perspective, global future imaginaries, but also in simplicity, reduction, and different forms of everyday life. Experiences that profoundly shaped his understanding of comfort, resilience, and material assumptions.

Privately, Blüm collects abstract paintings and Japanese bronze vases. His work appears in the form of books, essays, working papers, and research notes, dealing among other things with stable human-AI interaction, societal resilience, epistemic stability, future imaginaries, and the long-term dynamics of technological transformation.