DEBATE
DEBATE. Ai is the next industrial revolution after digitization. But the focus on own development of AI models is misdirected. It is something else that will make Sweden a successful export nation this time too, when a new technology turns the world upside down, writes Dan Bergh Johnsson.
This is a discussion article. The opinions expressed are the writer’s own.
The discussion about Sweden’s role in AI development is often about how we can develop our own language models, manufacture semiconductors or build AI data centers in the country.
Own language models are important, but do not give us an international position. Processor factories and ai data centers are almost unimportant. But what will give us more front position in the ai revolution, is how we apply the new technology. And there, through the Swedish engineering culture, we have an advantage.
We have a habit, in a way that colleagues from other countries often perceive as exotic, to include the whole group in problem solving, regardless of titles and how long ago we graduated.
Sweden is already a leading country in digitization today, and the country in Europe that has produced the most tech unicorns, i.e. companies with a market value of over a billion dollars, per capita.
In one article
about the Swedish example in the New York Times, a large number of economists, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are interviewed, such as the former head of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, Klarna’s founder Sebastian Siemiatkowski and Niklas Zennström, founder of Skype and now CEO of the venture capital company Atomico. The article’s conclusions can be summarized in three points that are seen as decisive for the Swedish successes:
1. The efforts of the early 1990s to increase citizens’ access to home computers and the Internet, with efforts such as subsidized personal computers and heavy investment in infrastructure expansion.
2. The tradition of co-financed innovation between business and government through universities, public pension funds and authorities such as Vinnova.
3. The Swedish welfare system that lowers the bar for entrepreneurs who want to take a risk. In Sweden, you can quit your job to start a business without risking your children’s opportunities for education and access to health care. It also means that people from more social classes are inclined to start businesses.
Today, 30 years later, digitization is no longer a vision of the future but a fact. Now we are facing the next industrial revolution, the ai revolution. So what is the equivalent of the 2020s and AI development to the conditions that existed and were put in place in Sweden in the 90s?
Two of the points from the New York Times list are still relevant, the ones dealing with the conditions for entrepreneurship and innovation, but one is not. Ai does not come with the high thresholds that digitization did. We don’t need new hardware, and we don’t need to learn new technology.
We ask questions and hand out tasks, ai answers and executes. In this way, it is no more difficult than working with a colleague. Instead, the decisive factor, I believe, is how we organize our work and – even more – how we collaborate.
Ai offers the automation of monotonous and time-consuming intellectual work, in the same way that industrialization offered the same for manual work. The expectation for ai is that the demand for qualified and strategic human skills will not decrease, quite the opposite. However, the simpler tasks will disappear completely.
This will be a big problem in companies with a hierarchical work culture, which is common in other industrialized nations. If only the experienced, older colleagues are allowed to devote themselves to the strategic problems, the younger ones will soon become redundant. How do you then develop new senior and strategic competence?
In Sweden, we have a unique lead in the Swedish engineering and collaboration culture. We have a habit, in a way that colleagues from other countries often perceive as exotic, to include the whole group in problem solving, regardless of titles and how long ago we graduated.
I remember when the agile way of working was a newly established concept and I wide-eyed told my father about it, even then a very experienced engineer who today would have passed the 90-year mark had he not unfortunately run out of time. When he had finished listening, he nodded in agreement while looking a little puzzled. “Yes, well, that’s the way we engineers have always done it,” he said. It was the way his senior colleagues taught him when he was a fresh graduate himself, and that they learned – a perspective that spans a century. Everyone participated in problem solving, everyone’s voice was heard.
This is thus a way Swedish engineers have collaborated for generations. And it is with that approach that we can quickly – faster than in other countries – take advantage of AI’s possibilities, whether it is about accelerating innovation, streamlining production or starting future export successes.
Our historical and future success is therefore, no matter how much we want to believe it, not that we have smarter engineers and developers than others. It is based on the fact that we have a smarter collaborative culture.
Dan Bergh Johnsoninnovationschef, Omegapoint
Source: www.nyteknik.se
