Don’t forget the human

What happens to our collective sense of self when AI grows up?

In the midst of this disruptive revolution we’re currently going through, we often neglect the most fundamental component of any technology: the human.

As someone who is helping build and deliver tech products inside a large company I have seen the very real impact of this — of the battle to get people to be welcoming and adopt these creations we’re coming up with.

No doubt some of it is down to us not communicating well enough, or poor change management, or an issue with a process that we haven’t ticked off… But this problem is much more widespread than just my company, and I believe there is something more curious going on.

Across the world the pace of change is rapidly increasing, with different technologies all maturing at the same rate and entering the workplace on mass. We’re getting more and more apprehensive about what is coming next and what it means for our jobs… but also what it means for us.

This is a meme going around quite a few shops/restaurants at the moment, and it’s a funny way of saying be nice to our staff, but it’s also touching on a deeper point, that humans are much more than mere mechanical things following a set of instructions… that they are, of course, human.

But what does being human mean?

As the Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert once said: Every psychologist must, at some point in their career, write a version of ‘The Sentence’

This sentence has been written and rewritten since the beginning of recorded history and in many ways the story of our sense of self is itself a history of proposed and debunked versions of The Sentence.

We once thought that we were the only animals that could use tools — we now know everything from fish to birds can do that;

We once thought that we were the only animals that had a language with syntax — but studies with Chimpanzees showed that wasn’t the case;

We once thought that we were the only things that can do maths and logic — but who here thinks they can outdo a computer?

Eventually we will get to probably the most famous phrase in all of philosophy, courtesy of Rene Descartes:

“I think therefore I am”

The crux of this idea is that every thought, no matter how unreliable, proves I exist — a thinking thing. Now that, surely, is uniquely human. What else in existence is so self aware, self reflecting to have the presence of mind to realise “I think, therefore I am”?

Hold that thought.

You may remember AlphaGo from the time it beat Lee Sedol, the world Go champion, 4 games to 1 back in 2016. This was an unprecedented break through in the field of AI (and incidentally a great movie on Netflix). Winning at Go — a game that has more possible permutations than there are atoms in the universe — requires understanding of what your opponent is planning, recognising patterns and, crucially, that unique human trait of intuition. This is why AlphaGo was hailed as a breakthrough. Deep Mind managed to programme gut instinct into a computer at least a decade ahead of the earliest expectations.

However, as amazing as that achievement was, AlphaGo was taught by humans. Its programmers effectively told it how Go works, how to play, how to train, built the processes for it to learn and then supplied it with data from real games. Lots and lots of data.

AlphaGo Zero is the next generation. With zero input from the programmers it took a mere 21 days to get to the same level as the prior version, beat it 100-Nil, and did all of this by teaching itself.

It has become self aware… at least in terms of Go.

We are being challenged at a fundamental level by AI, and in the next few decades we may no longer be the only thinking, self aware things. I believe this is a (subconscious) root cause of much of our strife over the current pace of change.

Once again we don’t know what the answer to The Sentence is but this time it’s wrapped up with a troubling question: Are we going to become not only unemployed, but unemployable?

We are in the era where thought itself can be mechanised.

Mechanising thought in itself shouldn’t be a problem, but it has become a huge issue… and it comes from an idea that the entirety of the West (and later, the world) has been hung up on for quite some time — We value left brain thinking above all else, and we have tied our sense of self sternly to its mast.

By stubbornly focusing all of our attention and education on the left hemisphere (maths, language and science determines the success or failure of seemingly all the schools in the world) we’ve actually started becoming computers.

This attitude has naturally spilt over into the world of work. There is a persistent trend that all jobs be streamlined, turned into processes and standardised to death. You are responsible for your little bubble, mechanically doing the same motions for each day, for each piece of work that comes your way.

Fears over AI miss the point. Our jobs are already mechanised, it just so happens that humans are currently doing them. AI, RPA, blockchain and the rest are not an infection or cancer of the job market, on the contrary. They are an overdue therapy, coming to consume only those tasks of the workplace that are no longer human, allowing us to be ourselves once again

What does all of this mean for us?

Yes, the computers are coming, embrace the change! It will make our lives easier, our work will be completed faster, more accurately and we might even be able to go home on time… but it also means our jobs will become that little bit less process, that little bit more human.

Not that many people I know actually enjoy the 80% of drudgery that modern work relies on… What we enjoy is the 20%. The creative thinking, explaining things to clients, exploring new options to make something better. The human side of our mechanised role.

So, please, when you go back to your desks really think what can be automated, what part of your job could be done by a five year old? Then either have a go at automating it yourself, go to IFTTT or Workato, have a go at learning some simple code… or even write out the steps of the process that needs to be done and reach out to your innovation team. Chances are you’re not the only one bored to death by this piece of work.

That part of your job is already automated… lets get the machine to do it.