Podcast · Kuuntelija Kuuntelija · 2026-04-12 · 2:32:47 · In Finnish
AI Will Change Everything and Our Decision-Makers Understand None of It — Sami Miettinen on Kuuntelija
Published as “Tekoäly tulee muuttamaan KAIKEN eivätkä päättäjämme tajua siitä MITÄÄN — Sami Miettinen”
Hosted by: Roni Arvonen
Sami Miettinen joined Kuuntelija host Roni Arvonen for two and a half hours on artificial intelligence — the longest single treatment of the subject he has given, and the one that goes furthest into the practical detail.
The economic argument has a sharp edge to it. The standard Marxist frame holds that capital is accumulated human labour and that a return on capital is therefore taken from the worker. Sami’s point is that AI breaks the frame rather than confirming it: an inference machine is not really capital in that sense, because it substitutes for human labour directly and prices it, and the capital requirement for using one is small. From there the conversation moves to the pension system, where the arithmetic is uncomfortable — roughly €150bn of earned income, of which about €110bn is wages and €40bn pensions, and pensions do not themselves generate the contributions that fund the outflow. If AI thins the wage base, a €285bn buffer does not close that gap. The immigration section runs on the same logic: employment rates differ sharply between population groups, and importing labour to do work that is about to be automated is the wrong bet.
The most useful stretch for a listener is the hour on building an agent. Sami walks through the actual stack — a cheap always-on Mac Mini with 16GB and an M4, OpenClaw (Peter Steinberger’s project, released January 2026 and briefly the fastest-growing repository on GitHub), a WhatsApp channel as the interface, a foundation model behind it, and a second store that refines his own ideas rather than serving the assistant. He is candid about the costs, about a hundred euros of tokens at the time of recording, and about the security posture: hardened channels, logging, alerts on anything not initiated through a legitimate channel, and never building a dependency on a single vendor. Refusing a tool because you dislike its founder, he argues, is simply a bad way to work.
Two threads run underneath. One is the “villapaitaekonomisti” — the wool-jumper economist wheeled into a studio to explain hysteresis while not using these tools at all, and writing bad prompts when he does. The other is that Finnish decision-makers are discussing budgets in which the word AI does not appear once.
Chapters
- 00:00 — Opening
- 02:29 — Sami’s first word
- 02:56 — The wool-jumper economists
- 05:35 — Sami’s background with AI
- 13:10 — Karl Marx: why AI labour is not capital in that sense
- 20:51 — The trade union movement
- 28:11 — What AI can already do
- 34:24 — Decision-makers who have not noticed
- 44:46 — AI and immigration
- 51:45 — Is a podcast entrepreneur safe?
- 1:00:04 — Which jobs disappear
- 1:18:36 — The bank valuation is going away
- 1:26:44 — Grok and X
- 1:40:15 — How to build your own AI agent
- 2:14:38 — Superintelligence
- 2:20:21 — What AI threatens
- 2:27:08 — The world ten years from now
The recording lives on Kuuntelija’s own channel and they own it. This page is a record of the appearance and a pointer to the original, not a copy of it. Timestamps follow the chapter marks Kuuntelija published with the episode.
Roni Arvonen has also appeared on the Neuvottelija channel, in When a tweet is made a crime.
From the same session: Neuvottelija's own episode
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