How different perspectives can be. To me, Finland is surfing the waves of new tech very well. This is also the view of various institutions that praise Finland for rapid new tech adoption & progress in digitization. Living here feels like living in the future compared to Germany. https://twitter.com/alasaarela/status/1299987664993685506

In any case a good thread, although I'm not onboard with everything. I work with industrial robots and state of the art manufacturing and full automation is still very far away. Currently, many jobs change rather than getting replaced entirely.

Cases like Uber are also not convincing me. The entire business model is unworkable right now and self-driving cars are not guaranteed to make it better because they bring a whole lot of new financial expenses that will replace current ones. They also need to be available first.

Even the people who were bullish on self-driving cars are now a lot more cautious about the timeline. And after their readiness it will take time until they become all-pervasive. We are decades into the manufacturing robot revolution and most firms still don't have any.

I like the post-scarcity idea and the reduction of work, too but I'm sceptical whether that will come about in my lifetime. We could have reduced working hours already in the last decades but we didn't. There are too many vested interests that will do everything to prevent it.

That being said, I think @alasaarela is right that regulation needs to advance. I'm just not as pessimistic about the current state of affairs in Finland in this regard. The paper industry is an example of a legacy industry but hanging on to it doesn't mean Finland doesn't adapt.

One of the interesting facts about Finland is precisely that it is an advanced digital nation (compared e.g. to Germany) despite having such a historical connection to paper production. It did not stop Finland from embracing digitization but it easily could have.

Paper will shrink, no doubt, but paper producers are doing many other things from wood already that will demand many human workers for the foreseeable future. What counts is to make sure that there products are made in Finland so we're back to the conflicts about Kaipola.

And next up after making sure they are made in Finland, we need to do this without making people work for bad wages. And *that* is a lot more difficult to do than the cold warriors of unions and employer outfits are suggesting. It's a whole set of variables, not just wages.