Announcing our first Venture Studio and welcoming Erik Starck
At BootstrapLabs we are excited to welcome Erik Starck, as our Head of BootstrapLabs Venture Studio for Future of Work. Below you can find some short insights about our recently announced Venture Studio and learn more about Erik`s vision.
Erik, why did you decide to join BootstrapLabs?
A few months ago I decided to join my longtime friend and AI investor Nicolai Wadstrom at BootstrapLabs, to lead the new Venture Studio, and to explore and implement new cutting edge solutions to increase productivity by leveraging artificial intelligence technologies. BootstrapLabs has been pioneering Applied AI investments, and is uniquely positioned in the world of AI.
It took me only 1 week to accept their offer. Nicolai and his team have built one of the highest quality communities of AI experts, invested in some of the top emerging category leader startups, and most importantly, shared my vision: it is not about where AI will have impact, but when. Sooner or later, AI will be applied everywhere.
Everything that can be automated will be automated — and everything that has been automated can be augmented by AI.
What does that mean for the future of work?
Many years ago I wrote an article in a Swedish magazine about a variant of the Turing test that I called “the expert Turing test”.
The Turing test as described on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test)
For those not familiar with the Turing test, it is meant to test a computer for general intelligence, by asking questions using a terminal to a computer and a human behind two locked doors. If it’s not possible to distinguish between the computer and the human, the computer has “won”. It is to be considered equally intelligent (perhaps even conscious — but that’s another debate) as the human.
In my variant of the test, I exchanged the computer with a human using an internet connected computer in one room and an expert on a certain topic in the other. The human with the internet computer is a complete novice on the same topic.
When it’s not possible to distinguish the expert from the novice-with-computer, the novice “wins”.
The idea is that the human mind is augmented by the computer, to the level where even an amateur can perform certain tasks like a pro. The “expert Turing test” is thus a kind of IA test — as in Intelligence Augmentation — rather than AI (Artificial Intelligence).
Back in the ‘80s, Steve Jobs called the computer “a bicycle for the mind” due to how the computer makes the mind more efficient. Well, thanks to AI, this decade we will leave the bicycle stage (perhaps we already have?). Computers are becoming more like rocket ships for the mind than bicycles!
Computers have already made certain jobs obsolete, but it has also created new ones. Many more will come as the economy transforms into one driven by a new kind of operating system of apps and services that greatly enhances human capabilities.
This transition creates huge opportunities to create better co-workers, better teams, and better organisations (something I will be exploring as the Head of BootstrapLabs Venture Studio for Future of Work). This decade is going to bring amazing progress and we will look back on the early ‘20s as just the beginning. Exciting times.
