Interview with Bjørn Glavind

Date: 05.07.2019 Reading time: 1 min. By: Louise Orbesen

Bjørn Glavind is an entrepreneur by heart. His accomplishments include founding the case competition, IBCC, during his studies at the competitive B.Sc. International Business program at CBS, and unlike most of his classmates, he didn’t go straight to a master’s degree but joined a startup in New York instead. Bjørn is currently Director of Business Development at Neurescue, a promising startup that develops a new device for treatments of cardiac arrest & bleedings. 

What is appealing for the young generation?

– It’s true that millennials want meaning. I feel meaning from a job when I am learning.

– There’s definitely a trend that being an entrepreneur today is like being a pilot in the 1950s. It’s very hyped.

Do today’s leaders need prestigious educations?

– I live by the saying “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”. Knowledge these days is so easily accessible. I can take all kinds of courses online, like coding for instance – that’s what you do. If you go to Harvard or Stanford, you pay for the network, not the education.

– If I spend the time and money required for an MBA on networking intensively instead, I may even be able to create an even better network than from attending an Ivy-league school.

How will exponential technologies impact our society?

– Blockchain technology will decentralize power by a lot. Technology today can’t facilitate direct democracy in a safe way, but blockchain technology may be the solution. This will lead us to questions about how to reorganize society. Do we need a technocracy where some people have more to say about certain matters than others?

– Today, a few big players basically own the internet. That is insecure and vulnerable in terms of risks of hacking and corruption. Blockchain technology will change the status quo completely.

– Universal basic income may be the answer to the unemployment we will experience from machine learning and AI developments. I have always been quite liberal, but I am starting to maybe see that, in the future, liberalism and extremely pure marxism actually may be bridged with by the hands of technology and abundance.

– Simulations have shown that entrepreneurship increases tremendously with universal basic income. Imagine you don’t have to worry about money for your food and safety – you will start to live out your dreams, and ideas will flourish from the mind.

What are the biggest challenges with AI seen from a leadership perspective?

– If AI supplements us in all of our work, we need to educate our children differently. Rather than learning regular school subjects, it will be vital for our children to know about ethics and philosophy for managing the AI, and to clean up our planet after all the crap we left them with.

– In general, we may see a scenario where poverty will decrease as a result of AI, but the Gini coefficient will increase. There will be two groups, one with those who own the machines (AI), and the rest who needs to be provided for. In this case, the biggest challenge for the future’s leaders will be how to bridge these groups.

– My friend came up with an idea – make pension funds that invest in the AI machines. Democratize the ownership of capital instead of having them on few hands.