S1E16 - Sami Mäkeläinen

FORWARD development partner Daniel Bluzer-Fry in conversation with Senior Industry Fellow Sami Mäkeläinen. Having spent his early career as a software engineer in both his native Finland and the US, Sami proceeded to work for Nokia, and recently finished 13 years as a leader in Telstra, in which he established the organisation’s strategic foresight practice. He has recently founded Transition Level to explore how society and organisations can manage the transition to a more automated civilization and mitigate the risks in and around that transition. Sami has also served as an external expert evaluator for the European Commission, is a research fellow at the Institute for the Future think tank and a fellow at the Institute for Integrated Economic Research in Australia. In this conversation, shares his background as a technologist with a fascination with ethics around innovation. Sami talks around his interests in automation, skill degradation and moral crumple zones: “The moral crumple zone is a situation where humans are put in a position to essentially take the blame for something that isn’t their fault. In order to protect the system, the system doesn’t have to change or doesn’t have pressures to change. So we witnessed like low grade middle crumbles on whatever day, when your utility provider screws up your bill and you call the call centre, the poor agents there, it’s not their fault that your bill was wrong. Yet they cop the blame from the customers 24/7 Or hopefully, two hours, but they they end up taking the fall, they end up taking the blame for something that isn’t their problem, or isn’t their fault. So there’s this dichotomy between accountability and responsibility. This also takes place in more serious situations.” LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/smakelainen/