“The center of any change that we’re doing in the fourth industrial revolution is always the human being, because humans have an ability to adopt, adapt to skills, and adjust to an environment.”

–Henrik von Scheel

About Henrik von Scheel

Henrik von Scheel is Co-Founder of advisory firm Strategic Intelligence, Chairman of the Climate Asset Trust, Vice Chairman of Regulatory Intelligence Committee, and Professor of Strategy, Arthur Lok Jack School of Business, among other roles. He is best known as originator of Industry 4.0, with many awards and extensive global recognition of his work.

Website:

von-scheel.com

LinkedIn Profile:

Henrik von Scheel

What you will learn

Why human-centered AI is crucial for widespread societal prosperity
The impact of AI hype cycles, media narratives, and the realities of technology adoption
How equitable wealth distribution and capital allocation in AI can shape economic outcomes
Risks around data ownership, privacy, and the importance of controlling your own data in the AI era
Divergent approaches to AI regulation in the US, EU, and China, and the implications for global AI leadership
The importance of trust calibration and intentional human-AI collaboration in practical applications
How education and lifelong learning can be reshaped by AI to support individualized growth and mistake-enabled reasoning
Opportunities for AI to amplify individual talents, address educational gaps, and enable more specialized and innovative skills

Episode Resources

Transcript

Ross Dawson: Henrik, it is wonderful to have you on the show.

Henrik von Scheel: Thank you very much for having me, Ross.

Ross Dawson: So I think we’re pretty aligned in believing that we need to approach AI from a human-centered perspective and how it can bring us prosperity. So I’d just love to start with, how do you think about how we should be thinking about AI?

Henrik von Scheel: Well, I think, like every technology that comes into play, it brings a lot of changes to us. But I think the center of any change that we’re doing in the fourth industrial revolution is always the human being, because humans have an ability to adapt, adapt to skills, and adjust to an environment. So technology is something that we apply, but it’s the strategy on how we adapt with it that makes a difference. It’s never the technology itself.

So I’m excited. It’s one of the most exciting periods for the industry and for us as people.

Ross Dawson: There’s a phrase which I’ve heard you say more than once around AI should make us smarter, healthier, and wealthier. So if that’s the case, how do we frame it? How do we start to get on that journey?

Henrik von Scheel: So I think what people experience today in AI is that they experience a lot of media hype—large language models, ChatGPT, and all of this—and they consume it from the media. So there’s a big hype around it, and I believe that AI is about to crash fundamentally, but crashing in technology is not bad, right? There are a lot of promises and then an inability to deliver, and then it crashes. What you hear in the media today is very much driven by a story of them raising funds because it’s so expensive, and so they are promising the world of everything and nothing, and the reality looks a little bit better.

The world that they are presenting is that you will be replaced, and you will be happy, and you’ll be served by everything else. And somehow it will work out. We don’t know how, but it will work out. And that’s not a future that is really a real future.

The future must include that everybody gets smarter, wealthier, and healthier. And when I say everybody, I mean not only the guys that have money, that they become more rich, or the middle class. It’s like everybody in society should get smarter from AI. That means part of the things that they need to learn or how human evolution works should be better, and it should make us healthier people and wealthier people.

So it should not only be that we sacrifice our convenience with our freedom, with our privacy, with our environmen...