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Lauri Lavanti
About Lauri Writing Contact Newsletter FI SV
Lauri Lavanti
About Lauri Writing Contact Newsletter FI SV

Writing

Lauri Lavanti sitting on a stool leaning against a tall table. He is wearing a black blazer and a blue-and-white floral shirt. In the blazer pocket is a multicoloured pocket square. A staircase in the background.

AI is changing everything — work, the economy, and how the state serves us. I write about how it lands on three things that have to keep working: the economy, learning, and freedom. Their synthesis is digital independence: a society that uses technology on its own terms.

What does it mean to live in the age of AI?

I have over a decade of hands-on experience building secure software and banking systems. From that background I write about why AI does not merely speed up work but forces us to rethink the whole social safety net, why digital independence is a precondition for a free society, and how to ensure that the benefits of technology reach everyone — not only a few.

Artificial intelligence

I work with AI tools professionally as a lead developer — and I have built my whole team's ways of working with them. I argue from hands-on experience, not theory. AI is the most significant productivity transformation of our time, and Finland must engage with it actively and critically.

AI amplifies both capability and bias. In public-sector applications — benefits decisions, permit processing, predictive policing — the stakes are too high to deploy systems without transparency and human oversight. I advocate for auditable algorithms in consequential decisions, open-source models where feasible, and mandatory human review for decisions that affect individual rights.

The more powerful AI becomes, the more important privacy protections are. AI systems are data-hungry; without strong data protection rules, they become surveillance infrastructure. The EU AI Act is a step in the right direction, but implementation must be substantive — not checkbox compliance.

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Economy

Finland’s economy needs to keep working through the AI transition. That means new companies, new jobs, and public services that actually use the technology rather than buy it as a black box. Without serious technology competence in parliament, decisions about AI procurement, data infrastructure, and labour policy are made by people who don’t know what they are buying.

I write about the economy through the lens of what I have done for over a decade: built software and software teams across different industries. AI changes the basis of work, competitiveness and public services. Finland can lead this shift, but only if public investment is targeted at domestic capability in a way that actually understands what is being done.

A working economy in the AI era is not a slogan. It is substance: skills that survive the transition, businesses that can build on Finnish and European infrastructure, and a state that procures technology on its own terms.

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Learning

Finland's strength has always been its people and their skills. In the AI era, learning has to stay seamless — from early childhood education through working life — so that no one is left behind by a transition that is already underway. Without that, the productivity gains of AI accumulate to a small group while the rest watch their work change without the tools to keep up.

Education is not a cost item to be trimmed when the budget tightens. It is the central infrastructure of the whole post-AI economy. Cuts to teaching, to libraries, to vocational training and to adult learning are paid back tenfold when the labour market shifts faster than people can learn new things.

Seamless learning means the path stays open — between schools, between jobs, between life stages. AI makes that path vastly more important. The country that keeps the path open for everyone gets the full potential of its people. That is a stronger foundation than any other competitive advantage.

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Freedom

Freedom in the AI era is not abstract. It is whether your data, your communications and your ordinary life remain yours when most of the infrastructure around them is owned by someone else. Privacy is the basic case — but the broader question is whether civil liberties survive technology that scales surveillance to everyone, almost for free.

I have spent my career building software in environments where the rules around data were taken seriously — banking, security, regulated systems. That experience makes one thing obvious: privacy and civil liberties don't protect themselves. They are protected by laws, by procurement choices, and by people in parliament who can read a technical proposal and tell whether it does what it claims.

Securing freedom in the AI era means being honest about the trade-offs. Mass surveillance, expanding the use of biometric identifiers, and chat scanning are not neutral tools waiting to be used wisely. They reshape the relationship between citizens and the state. The job of parliament is to set limits before the tools are built — not to debate them after the fact.

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Digital independence

Finland and Europe must control their own digital infrastructure. I am the lead author of the digital independence citizens' initiative. With it, we demand that Finland reduce its dependency on a small number of foreign digital service providers.

Finnish public administration is heavily dependent on US hyperscalers — for example Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. The geopolitical risk of that dependency has grown substantially since 2022. Finnish and European alternatives exist: UpCloud is a concrete example of a high-performance domestic cloud provider that public sector organisations can choose today. I advocate for breaking up public IT procurement, preferring open source, and factoring in crisis resilience.

Digital independence is also about data portability and avoiding vendor lock-in. Public data generated with public money should be portable and stored in a way that foreign states cannot misuse it.

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Kirkkonummi

I am a Kirkkonummi municipal councillor. That means I have a say in the municipal budget, zoning, service contracts, and infrastructure — decisions that directly shape what it is like to live here. Most of those decisions are made without much public attention, and that is exactly when it matters who is in the room and what they understand.

The issues I push hardest on locally are the same ones I write about nationally: digital services that actually work for residents rather than just checking a procurement box, urban planning that builds on Kirkkonummi's geography instead of fighting it, and public transport that connects the municipality rather than leaving whole neighbourhoods car-dependent.

Kirkkonummi is a bilingual, coastal municipality growing fast at the edge of the Helsinki region. It has real assets — shoreline, nature, a mixed community — and real pressures: a revenue base that struggles to keep up with demand, and a rail corridor that matters enormously for how the whole region develops. Local politics here is not small politics.

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