As a German coming from Mannheim, and now living on the Canadian West coast, I have to say that this is exactly the mindset that makes it so difficult to innovate in Germany. While people have a top education and know everything they need to, they don't have a "digital mindset". I think of myself now as computing process, and see myself as a cyberneticist in the German philosophical tradition of Hegel, Marx, Hilbert, Gödel and Bloch, but even I more often than necessary mistrust innovations.
Almost all the science fiction and cybernetic work of the last 75 years came either out of the Eastern block, or out of the US. There is basically no German sci fi vision, and there is extreme reluctance to speculative, big picture thinking as it is pursued in Silicon Valley. Software companies grow quickly and need a very different approach. Silicon Valley mostly understands this scaling aspect and winner take all markets really well. German investors are cheap and extremely risk averse, I tried to build a software company in Germany and it is hard.
While a lot of the current AI work was also done in Germany, e.g. by Schmidhuber, Germans are stuck in their business model. I recommend Münchau's book "Kaput" (or one of his podcast interviews) on how poorly Germans have adapted to the non-industrial aspects of a modern economy (read: "services"). I really hope that more tech founder thinking like Benz, Bosch or Siemens returns to Germany in a modern form. But I don't see it yet, and Germans are still super reactive and conservative to larger changes. The Greens tried to think a bit out of the box, and were heavily punished for it. In general there is basically no political representation for building a new successful economy. At best there is this nice little narrative about the long established "Mittelstand", which has produce almost zero software companies. The first step right now would be to own the idea of the EU, and wanting to win instead of complaining.