The Future of the Nation-State

How the nation-state can find a way through digitalization.    Note: This essay is published as chapter 17 in the book Digital Transformation and Public Services: Societal Impacts in Sweden and Beyond. The book is the final report from The Internet and its Direct and Indirect Effects on Innovation and the Swedish Economy—a three-year research project funded by The...

Eight + one megatrends you need to check out in 2018

A new year has just begun, with phenomena and trends that were mere ideas just a few years ago. Change will never be as slow as today, and therefore it is important to look up to see the big picture. Here are eight megatrends, plus one upcoming hot topic, you need to keep an eye...

Jobs will go away… but not work!

With digitization and automation jobs will disappear, but we'll continue to work anyway. That is what several experts I have been talking to believe. They also think that distribution of wealth in society could become the biggest challenge ahead. None of the experts I have been talking to about jobs and the future is opposed to the picture that...

Here’s my Youtube channel on technology driven change

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_b5TQl-ygGo Technology is changing our world at an accelerating pace, and the change is going faster than most people would think. This is the theme that interests me the most and that I'm passionate about, and it's also the theme that I regularly give talks and seminars on, at conferences and to various institutions, government...

Survival of the Fittest Technology

I already outlined the ideas of author and entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil, currently Engineering Director at Google, on exponentially accelerating technological change. His ideas are based on what he calls the Law of Accelereting Returns -- the fairly intuitive suggestion that whatever is developed somewhere in a system, increases the total speed of development in the whole...

A really good post on ethics for machines, robots, cars…

Here's a really good piece on the difficulty but also the importance of ethics for machines, robots, autonomous cars, arms and similar stuff powered by artificial intelligence: Moral Machines by Gary Marcus, Professor of Psychology at N.Y.U. Prof Marcus argues that the moment autonomous cars will be so much better and safer than human drivers that we...

Six industries that will be hit by digital revolution

Some people in the music industry still wonder what happened when an established and profitable business model was torn to pieces in a few years. Well, soon a lot more people in several other industries will ask themselves the same thing. I just outlined six industries that will be hit in the next future in...

We just launched Next Magasin – on how technology’s changing the world

A few days ago we finally launched Next Magasin – a new magazine on how technology's changing the world (just to be clear, it's only in Swedish for now). I'm the managing editor and it's been a great time to work with the first issue, which is free to download or to read on Ipad/Android/Pc....

Forget the digital divide

The concept of The Digital Divide – the haves and the have nots in the digital era – has been firmly established and taken for granted for at least a decade. Therefore it was very refreshing to read Christopher Mims' post in Technology Review, entitled "There's no Digital Divide". It's basically an interview with Jessie Daniels,...

Watch out for humans pushed to the edge

I just read a piece in Wired Magazine on high school students having debates at 350 words per minute. And it came to my mind that in history of technology it's a well known fact that when a technology is at its last stages, just before being widely replaced by a better and more versatile...

What would it be like to be super intelligent?

Have you ever considered the immediate images appearing in your mind when you hear the word super intelligence? Maybe an alien with a huge cranium staring at you... or a computer controlling every step you take...? Or have you ever tried to imagine what such a super intelligence actually thinks of you? It might turn...

Did you ever wonder what technology really wants?

Kevin Kelly, writer and founding editor of Wired Magazine, did. And he put down the answer really well in his book “What Technology Wants” published in 2010. It’s still really worth reading, giving inspiration to anyone who wants to gain understanding on how we should shape technology to do more good and less harm. If...