This article was originally published on Kendra Vant’s substack Data Runs Deep at https://kendravant.substack.com/p/sami-makelainen-on-data-and-ai-in on December 12th, 2024. Kendra is a friend and a thoughtful advocate for all things data and AI; she’s running a mini-interview series and I had the honor of being the first cab off the rank […]

We don’t often like putting ourselves in the spotlight, but sometimes it’s worth doing precisely that – especially when you can do it safely in the comfort of your home. Don’t use GenAI as an answer engine. Use it as a question engine. There’s now solid research showing that testing […]

You may or may not know the concept of the moral crumple zone. It’s a term coined by Madeleine Clare Elish, PhD some years ago, and it refers to a situation in which a human is held morally or legally responsible for the actions of a system, even though they […]

A collaborative piece by Sami Mäkeläinen, Lakshmi Rengarajan, and Susanne Forchheimer. Originally published on Medium and on IFTF Insights in June 2024 When OpenAI released a demo video of GPT-4o, audiences marveled at the real time conversational capabilities of the AI. But astute observers noticed something else. The AI was […]

Ah, humanity. Give us any shiny new thing, and we’ll find a way to turn it into a battlefield. The “us versus them”-framing comes to us very naturally, and we now have solid psychological research explaining the phenomenon. It’s a highly damaging trait, and ideally, that knowledge would allow us […]

Late-stage capitalism; post-truth; climate apocalypse; permanent crisis – for years now, we have been told that we’re living an end of an era. Well, if this – whatever this is – is ending, what comes next? That depends on who you are talking to, and it ranges from extinction to […]

Future-ready businesses not only outperform the average, but also significantly outshine them, enjoying 33% higher profitability and a staggering 200% greater market capitalisation. When it comes to the future, all roads seem to now point to AI, but its implications for organisations and the adoption of AI tools remain less […]

Welcome to the long emergency. Whether it’s the Mediterranean or Hawaii on fire, China and Slovenia flooding or the Arctic melting at unprecedented rates, climate change is not something anyone can hide from anymore; not physically, and certainly not intellectually. This is Lahania, Maui, before and after the fire that […]

Right now, there’s plenty of excitement and concern alike about the rapid progress of AI. We went through a period of anxiety a decade ago, when we had the first wave of AI job apocalypse predictions. Then it waned, and much of the world now has more trouble finding employees […]