Fifty years ago, the Sex Pistols released Anarchy in the UK and helped ignite a musical revolution. A year later came God Save the Queen and Pretty Vacant – songs that challenged established structures with an energy impossible to ignore. So, what can music history teach us about AI and technology development?
Contributed by Per Nyquist, CEO, Brokerway AB
The Sex Pistols were part of a tradition of creative disruption. Elvis changed popular music. The Beatles reinvented what a band could be. James Brown helped shape funk, Grandmaster Flash helped define hip-hop, and Nirvana transformed rock again in the early 1990s.
The same creative disruption can be found in science and technology. Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin changed medicine. Alan Turing helped lay the foundations of modern computing. Like great musical innovators, they saw something others had not yet seen.
That is perhaps the most fascinating aspect of great discoveries. Years of knowledge and experience can suddenly combine into an insight that seems to appear from nowhere. It is often born from something profoundly human: creative intuition – seeing a possibility before anyone can fully explain it.
AI can write code, analyse information, and suggest solutions at extraordinary speed. Within securities processing, it can become an enormously powerful tool.
But when systems handle securities, cash, corporate actions, settlement or tax, somebody must still understand exactly what has been produced – down to the smallest relevant detail.
We know the risk of key-person dependency: when critical knowledge is concentrated in too few people, an organisation becomes vulnerable. AI could solve that problem – or make it worse. Accepting generated code or conclusions without understanding and challenging them simply replaces human dependency with dependency on an algorithm.
The Sex Pistols and Nirvana demonstrated the extraordinary power of creative disruption. Both changed music and became enormously successful remarkably quickly. But both bands also collapsed, and individual members paid a heavy personal price.
Revolution can change everything – but disruption alone is not sustainability.
The Rolling Stones provide an interesting contrast. Formed in 1962, they have survived changing generations, technologies, musical trends, and changes within the band itself. More than sixty years later, they are still performing.
Perhaps that is the real lesson for AI.
Technological change cannot be stopped – nor should it be. AI is already becoming a new member of the band, in music, software development, and the securities industry.
Long-term success requires understanding who the members are, what each contributes, and who remains responsible for the result.
AI brings speed, knowledge and new capabilities. Humans bring responsibility, experience, creative intuition, and the ability to imagine something that does not yet exist.
The challenge is not simply to create the next revolution. It is to make it sustainable.