At Liminal Discovery, we are constantly working to connect with people that make things more interesting, more curious, more clear or more weird or both. One such person is Andreas Ekström, member of our advisory board. We decided to ask him a few questions for you all to get to know him a little better.
You are a speaker, a consultant, and an author. What is the core of your professional self?
Most of all, I see myself as a reporter. Even though my main line of work today is all about speaking, educating and working tightly with boards and leaders of all kinds to try to figure out where society is headed, I am still a reporter at heart. Among other things, that identity makes me obsessed with finding the right questions for a group. Sometimes getting the questions right can be more interesting and productive than chasing an immediate answer.
One of your missions is to educate people about digital equality. What is digital equality?
The world needs to be better at distributing digital wealth, which isn’t only measured in money, but also in knowledge, power and bandwidth. It is, at the end of the day, a question of what sort of world we want to build. Those of us who have the privilege of being online, and that’s only two thirds of the world’s population at this point, have a moral obligation to get the world connected digitally. And I mean not only in a pure technical way, but with a deeper understanding.
What is the most important message from you in 2025?
You know, I am actually a little more hopeful at this point than I was about the AI revolution. Expertise will never go out of style, it will just need new outfits. Five years ago, there was almost blind faith in the future power of all sorts of data processing – but we can already see some clear limits, that will demand old fashioned things such as human judgment, personal experience and cultural taste. And those things are hard to get down in code!
You are a journalist and an author, a man of many words — what is your relationship to language and its importance?
I take great pleasure in being precise, and in making myself understood. Which also means that I am socially weird sometimes: if something hasn’t been said, it doesn’t quite count for me. When people say “oh, we have such a good wordless communication,” I see nothing but the perfect setup for a disaster waiting to happen… So I do have a love affair with language, and the opportunity for clarity that it gives me. That is also what attracted me to Liminal Discovery: a culture of telling it like it is.
