Closing remarks

Josef Lindman Hörnlund closes the day, on handwritten slides, with a question: what does the “industrialisation of knowledge work” that AI companies speak of mean for the people who do the work? He draws a line from shoes and hamburgers to AI systems. Factories made shoes cheaper and more plentiful, but gave up much of the quality and pride of the craft, which Richard Sennett describes as “the desire to do a job well for its own sake”. Theodore Levitt later proposed industrialising service in the same way, with McDonald’s as the model, and met a backlash: Jan Carlzon of SAS argued that service cannot be industrialised in a way that leaves people no joy in their work. Contracts drafted by AI may follow the path of shoes, cheaper and more widely available, while the best are still made by hand.

He asks practitioners to make the trade between craft and mechanisation a conscious decision, not one driven by margins alone, and to design AI systems that empower people rather than reduce them to the human in the loop. He ends by announcing GAIA Conference 2027 on 27 April 2027 and calling the volunteers who organised the conference on stage.