Esko Aho, former Prime Minister of Finland: We need to be optimistic about artificial intelligence

Mplus Grupa has launched ‘Future Talks’, a series of interviews with leading global visionaries and opinion makers, hosted by Luka Orešković, the president of Mplus’s Advisory Board. In the first interview, Orešković spoke with Eko Aho, former Finnish Prime Minister and member of Nokia’s Executive Board, about the transformation that Nokia and Finland underwent in the 1990s and his experiences in managing transformative social and technological shifts.

– I was born in the 1950s on a small farm in Finland and, when we talk about transformation, I have not seen any transformation like the one that occurred when we moved from horse-powered agriculture to machine-powered production. That was a real transformation that had a huge impact on our society. So, transformation is permanent. It happens faster or slower, but it is constantly happening.

But occasionally we have crises, and in times of crisis, transformation happens faster. There is a very simple reason. You have an urgent need to do something, and there are less aggressive forces against change. So, it is like a moment of change that needs to be fully utilized, and I think both Finland and Nokia did that in the 1990s. But people did not understand it at that moment. Nevertheless, those crises opened the door to a story of great success, both in Finland and in Nokia – said Eho.

‘Concept and context must be in balance’

Namely, Nokia’s reinvention is widely appreciated, Orešković explained. In fact, it has become a case study in many business schools, where it was really possible to question what its fundamental purpose is and what it does as a company. In the case of Nokia, transformation occurred several times during the company’s operation, which was founded in 1865 and has undergone several mass transformations.

– I think Nokia’s case is a fundamental example of the dependency between external circumstances and your concept. When external circumstances change, you have two options. You try to keep things as they are and lose, or you take those changes seriously and start changing your concept. So, the concept and context must be in balance. And Nokia made a fantastic choice in the 1990s in the midst of a crisis – said Eho.

We need to be optimistic about artificial intelligence

They concluded that their best asset in mobile phone production and telecommunications network business was to separate from everything else, which Eho described as a fantastic decision, especially when they did it with the expectation that the mobile phone market would grow from 10 million to 50 million in ten years. And the actual figure was 700 million.

So, if you have a good winning concept from 50 to 700, you immortalize it… And again, it did so in 2011, 2012, and 2013 when Nokia had to exit the mobile phone business and focus primarily on mobile or telecommunications networks, says Eho.

In conversation with Orešković, Eho also reflected on the accelerated development of artificial intelligence, regarding which he believes we must be optimistic, otherwise we will not survive.

– The shortage of labor, qualified labor is permanent. There will be that, and we cannot survive without greater productivity, especially in the public sector, in healthcare, in social care, in every sector. And AI will provide us with good tools. I have seen so many discussions where people said that technology kills jobs – it does kill, but it also creates jobs. And I actually believe that the same will happen with artificial intelligence.

In certain sectors, jobs will be extinguished, but in some other sectors, we will see a significant increase in labor utilization. My favorite expression is that the human touch is the future luxury and, for example, in the healthcare sector, we will need to shift resources from technical jobs to human contact, and artificial intelligence will help us a lot – explained Eho.