An interview with Ashkan Fardost
– Why We Must Understand Technology as Something Deeply Human
When Ashkan Fardost – former musician and researcher, now one of Sweden’s most sought-after speakers on the future, digitalization, and human behavior – visits Tech Royale, it quickly becomes clear that for him, technology is not about gadgets – it’s about people. This is a conversation about the internet generation clashing with the structures of the industrial age, about how our worldview has been shaped by the alphabet, and what AI really reveals about ourselves. It’s not technology about humans – it’s humanity itself.
The Hidden Influence: How Technology Shapes Our Worldview
Perhaps Ashkan’s most captivating idea is that our worldview – how we think, plan, and organize – has largely been shaped by something as ordinary as our writing system. In the West, we’ve been molded for centuries by alphabetic thinking. It’s a system that teaches us to break the world into parts, put them in the right sequence, and thereby create logic and understanding.
This logic is everywhere: in how we build companies (organizational charts, processes, departments), in how we manage operations (annual budgets, five-year plans, Excel models), and in how we try to comprehend phenomena like AI.
But the internet does not follow that logic.
The Great Cultural Clash: Sequence vs. Simultaneity
The internet is not sequential. It is simultaneous. It’s an environment where everything happens everywhere, all the time – and where the relationships between information matter more than the order in which it’s presented. That’s why a Wikipedia article is valuable not despite lacking a clear beginning and end, but because it’s linked to thousands of others.
This creates a fundamental generational clash. The older generation is shaped by the alphabetic paradigm, rooted in structures, hierarchies, and processes. The younger generation is shaped by the internet – and thus has a different understanding of how the world works and how problems should be solved. Where one generation plans in order to act, the other acts in order to understand.
This is not just a generational issue. It’s a cognitive clash between two information environments.
AI – A Mirror, Not an Oracle
It’s easy to view AI as something new, alien, and potentially all-knowing. But Ashkan Fardost argues that the most interesting thing about AI is not what the technology does – but what it reveals about us.
The AI systems we use today – language models, recommendation engines, personal assistants – are built on the idea that humans are deeply predictable. We are imitators, says Ashkan, not just in our behaviors but also in our dreams, opinions, and values. That’s why AI works – because it only needs to observe a small minority of content creators to predict what the rest of us will want.
But AI has its limits. What we often call wisdom – the ability to intuitively sense patterns, to make decisions with gut feeling, to create something unexpected yet fitting – cannot be mathematized. It cannot be broken down into rules. That’s why AI will never replace the truly experienced leader, educator, or creator.
In a world where much can be automated, the value of what can’t be automated increases.
From Mass Identity to Micro-Loyalties
At the same time, our societal structures face another kind of challenge. Previously, much of society was built around shared narratives – mass media, campfire TV moments, general knowledge. A national identity was constructed through a shared flow of information, made possible by the printing press.
Today, each of us has a printing press in our pocket. Everyone produces, consumes, and spreads information – and algorithms sort our feeds based on who we are, not what we need to know. This creates parallel experiences of the same reality.
This means the old societal glue – common references, shared stories, collective belonging – begins to dissolve. For Ashkan, this isn’t just a political or cultural challenge. It’s a technical consequence of how information is produced and distributed in a new media environment.
What We at HiQ Take With Us
Ashkan Fardost’s perspective is challenging. It asks us to look beyond technology as a tool – and see it as a force that deeply shapes people, societies, and organizations.
For us at HiQ, it’s a reminder that the future is not just about what we build – but how we understand the world we’re building in. If we want to stay relevant, we need to grasp technology’s deeper dimensions: as something existential, cultural, and deeply human.
Ashkan appears in HiQ’s podcast Tech Royale, where we dive deeper into what you’ve just read. Listen here!
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