Smart Technology Augments Our Humanity

Today we are relaunching Solita as a company that combines AI/data and human insight in a unique way to create new services, culture and technologies for better business and societies. We are one of the leading digital transformation companies in the Nordics. I’m proud to present our new story to the world. Here’s my personal take on why I find it important.

My world was shaken on the 11th of May, 1997. I was a 16-year-old kid, slightly overexcited about the game of chess. That was the day when a computer defeated a human world champion for the first time: IBM’s Deep Blue beat my hero Garry Kasparov in the final game of their six-game battle. That was also the day I quit playing chess. What’s the use for humans if computers do things better than the best of humanity, I remember thinking at the time.

Luckily Kasparov saw things differently. Instead of hanging up his chess pieces, he developed a new form of chess, Centaur Chess, where humans and machines join forces against AI. And humans and machines easily beat a computer together.

These days Kasparov’s law, as it’s called, is this: “a human plus a machine will beat a super-computer quite handily”. This is true not only for chess, but for more and more forms of the work we do. For example, a doctor helped by an image recognition algorithm makes a much better diagnosis than a lone pathologist or just a computer vision tool. Taxi drivers combining their knowledge of a city with a navigation algorithm and real-time data get to the destination smarter. Decision making that merges our human intuition and experience together with an AI’s capability to process large masses of data and discover new correlations is incomparable.

We Need New Ways of Working

I’m relieved that I was so wrong as a teenager. Now I firmly believe we are on a cusp of a new era. Smart technology helps us augment our humanity: to use our strengths of intuition, empathy and morality to create better businesses and societies, while having machines focus on crunching numbers and using their capabilities to relieve us of the stress of repetitive thinking. We empower machines with our creativity, and by doing that create something beautiful.

But to get to that new era, we need to improve our ways of working and thinking. The services that we create or the cultures that we build need to be designed differently. It’s not only a question of technology: every developer or AI specialist needs to be supported by service designers and experts of human insights, so that we can truly combine the strength of machines with the power of humanity.

Similar to the automatisation of farming or industry, when we automatise more of our knowledge work we will free ourselves to live better. Us humans will have more time to feel, to create and to have meaningful encounters with each other.

But it will not happen automatically. We need to ask ourselves actively in what kind of a world we want our future generations to grow up in. Already with machine learning algorithms we are able to predict the likelihood of an innocent person to commit a crime in the future or target propaganda to disenfranchised voter groups to sway election results. It is up to us to decide how we will allow these tools to be used, and what kind of constraints we want to place on technology as designers, business leaders and citizens.

The same algorithm that can be used to create individual preventive healthcare plans can also be used to deny health insurance from vulnerable people. With the former we can prevent much human suffering, but the latter leads to a society of haves and have-nots.

Build For Long-Term Impact

At Solita we aim to search for sustainable solutions towards the future. In everything that we help design and build we want to make a difference and take us all toward a better tomorrow.

We want to inspire novel approaches by engaging both our customer organisations and end-users of their services in co-design to better understand and solve problems in both business and customer experience.

Today Solita forms a unique technology, strategy and design company, which after our merger with Finland’s largest service design company Palmu in 2017 now employs more than 650 digital business experts from service designers, lean startup experts to software developers, business intelligence and data science specialists, as well as cloud and integration solution experts.

This makes us a transformative force with few peers. We use technology and human insight to create services, culture and technology that have a lasting impact. With more and more companies across the Nordics and Europe joining us on the journey, now is the time to relaunch our brand with an even bolder logo and stronger colours.

I’m proud to be part of Solita and work together towards a finer world.

Read more: www.solita.fi/en