Superhuman Will Soon Mean Being “Super Human”
How technology will force us to be the most empathetic, creative, and resilient generation yet
10,000 years ago, we thought that crazy physical strength and athletic ability made people superhuman.
Then, in the thousands of years that followed, there came horses, swords and armour… and we thought those strong people weren’t quite as cool anymore—clearly it was the people who could wield those tools that knew what they were doing.
Another couple thousand years later and we had steam engines and printing presses, and suddenly it was those who could perform arithmetic the quickest or memorize the most facts who were the real superstars.
Our definition of what it means to be superhuman—the skills, talents, and qualities we prize in society—has been constantly redefined under the pressure of technological change. (And thank god it has, my gym mark says I wouldn’t have fared well 10,000 years ago.)
But with fields like AI, IoT and biotechnology accelerating faster than ever before, this forces us as a society to ask ourselves some serious questions.
What will it mean to be skilled, talented or meaningful a hundred years, or even a decade from now?
What will we as humans be able to offer that technology can’t?
The Breakdown
- The future of work (inspired by Microsoft’s “The Future Computed”)
- Ensuring everyone can be excited about the future of tech
- Competing against more than just ourselves (our creations too)
- So… what to being super human?
What does the future of work look like?
Each advancement in technology has freed up more and more of our time and mental space by allowing us to focus less on tedious, repetitive, or small-scale tasks, and dedicate more of ourselves to new, dynamic and cognitively-demanding pursuits.
As it stands, our society values creativity, problem-solving, courage, and the like. However, there is still a huge emphasis on and need for physical dexterity, memorization and tool-based knowledge, whether that’s sewing intricate clothes, recognizing one of hundreds of diseases, or using Excel.
However, with the leaps and bounds that AI, robotics and internet infrastructure are making, these technologies are quickly making gains in all of those areas. Algorithms can now recognize tumours, crush it at Jeopardy and use our tools better than we can.
All of these advances are going to demand change from us yet again. More specifically, to focus on innovation, creativity, problem-solving and humanity.
I believe this has 2 big-picture implications for the future of our work.
Return of the humanities 🎨
A lot of people consider having an arts degree a joke these days, but the rise of technology means we need to have two types of people. Those who create the technology and those who determine what role it should play in society.
As AI takes on progressively more human roles, whether it be in writing, music, or the arts, it becomes increasingly important that technology reflects the same level of humanity in what they do and how they interact with the rest of the world.
This requires domain experts and neuroscientists in these areas to help shape our technology. To break down the hidden logic and patterns in the arts, to consult and refine the smart tools that will become part of their future creative process.
Shaping how tech will shape us — with the arts
With big tech comes big responsibility. Even with technology as it stands today, we need to start asking important questions about the ethical, sociopolitical and psychological implications of technology — and that’s a conversation that requires voices beyond just the tech community.
“Those of us who create AI, cloud and other innovations will know more than anyone else how these technologies work. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that we will know how best to address the role they should play in society.”
— Bill Gates
Despite the immense good that technology has helped cultivate, our abuse of these tools has done everything from setting off storms of misinformation to causing oil spills. However, this time the oil won’t just spill into the ocean, it may spill into our minds, our cultures, and the fabric of our society.
In the past, law and regulation has always lagged behind the tech it is meant to govern, but with the potential impact of tech growing in scale each year, we can no longer afford to sit back and watch the consequences unfold. This time, the messes we make may be too great for us to clean up.
All of this means that we need to get ahead of the tech, delve into profound discussions and determine how we want technology to shape us. We need to ask ourselves: what does it mean to be human in the age of AI? Should we — and if so, how do we — regulate information? How will the future of work, meaning and entertainment change? When does more become too much?
These are serious questions with serious implications that make psychologists, philosophers, economists, and political scientists more important than ever before. It is only with their expertise that we can create a future where technology will be used to help rather than to harm — so maybe it’s about time we stop making jokes about having a BA 👀
An interdisciplinary future 🔗
Technology has been permeating through — and therefore impacting — almost every aspect of society. The challenges that we’ll face will require consideration from hundreds of different industries, perspectives and disciplines — technology is bridging the gap between everyone from scientists and mathematicians to economists and artists.
As investigative reporter David Epstein describes in his work, Range, generalists are able to solve even highly specific problems because they draw analogies from other disciplines to bring innovative perspectives that the narrower, rule-based mindsets of specialists may struggle to notice.
In many ways these specialists are metaphors for rule-based AI. Rule-based learning is dependent on memory and repetition, and with the speed and storage capabilities of machines, it is a form of mental representation that humans cannot win at.
This means honing in on our analogical thinking, becoming connectors of new ideas rather than followers of rules. We need to broaden the lens with which we problem-solve and view the world to match the exponential growth and expansion of technology.
The way we innovate, collaborate, and legislate requires us to constantly step back and look at the bigger picture.
Setting up systems that ensure everyone can be excited about the future
I’m excited for the future of technology: the discoveries we’ll make, what we’ll do with them, and how they’ll change the world.
Nevertheless, this is a privilege. It is a privilege to be in a position where you can feel excited about technology because there are undeniably many real and negative short- and long-term impacts of technological advancement, many of which will disproportionately impact developing countries, impoverished communities, and marginalized groups.
Unfortunately, many jobs today face immediate risk of replacement through automation, especially those with blue-collar jobs, or those who perform repetitive or administrative white-collar work.
Like many others, these individuals’ work are their livelihoods, and for them technology is terrifying. It forces them to ask questions like:
- How will I support myself or my family?
- How do I find the time or resources to build new skills?
- Will the automated systems we create discriminate against me?
The onset of technology comes with serious questions about equity and fairness that we should all be concerned about. Machine learning algorithms are trained to make certain decisions based on the patterns they see in the data they’re given. If we aren’t careful about the data we train them with, the outcomes can range from a good laugh to the systemic discrimination of entire groups.
In 2016, Microsoft released an AI chatbot called Tay on Twitter in hopes that it could learn to talk casually. But Twitter being Twitter… people spoke to Tay using racist slurs, sexist comments, and just as a crappy human being. Before we knew it, Tay went from friendly bot to an extremist nightmare.
But in all seriousness, in that same year, the tool COMPAS (Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions) algorithm used in U.S. court systems was found to have misclassified black defendants for being high-risk reoffender almost twice as often as white individuals, specifically, a whopping 48 percent vs. 28 percent.
As Terence Shin, author of the article “Real-life Examples of Discriminating Artificial Intelligence” put it:
“The data we use needs to represent ‘what should be’, not ‘what is.’”
This requires thoughtful and diverse groups of people to decide “what should be”, how to make that happen, and to listen to the stories from the aftermath.
From the disparities we may create to the large-scale prejudices that we could perpetuate, we have to push for politicians, educators and policymakers alike to develop meaningful educational systems and legislation that will ensure no one is left behind.
Competing against more than just ourselves
In the age-old past we were in this evolutionary race, competing against other species that roamed the planet. However, as humans slowly began to dominate, we really only had to compete against ourselves.
Nevertheless, technology has taken us back to the past… except we’ve created our own competition now, a “rival” unlike any other.
With great competition comes great pressure. Technologies that can now quickly and continuously learn mean that we’re going to have to learn, unlearn and relearn faster than we’ve ever had to before.
This has a couple of major implications for us:
- Embracing resilience
- Forming mission-driven identities
- Using context to our advantage
- Honing our empathy
Embracing resilience and curiosity
In a society that will soon change at a rapid pace, we need to become more comfortable with being uncomfortable — of not always knowing but being okay with it.
There will be new technologies that inevitably create new problems, but there will also be new opportunities and new perspectives to solve them. Taking it a step further, this means being curious about the future, resilient towards change, and confident that we’ll be able to weather the storm.
Forming mission-driven identities 🎯
In today’s world, we often tie our identities to specific careers, skills, environments and accomplishments, but in an ever-evolving world, these aspects of ourselves may be nothing more than fleeting moments.
Our identities will have to be built on stronger, yet broader foundations than before. When the world around us is constantly transforming, the only constants we can center ourselves around are the bigger missions we choose to pursue and the values we hope to live by.
Using context to our advantage 🤔
As it stands, AI’s greatest difficulties appear to be with context, the ability to consider real life and common sense-like knowledge in the decisions they make.
From this, a pivotal challenge will be meaningful creativity — the generation of original ideas that reflect a specific purpose. We’ve all heard of the AIs composing sophisticated works of art or music, but their ability to express and challenge us to reflect on specific ideas of the world with these creations remains questionable.
Consider Cai-Guo Qiang, a world-renowned artist known for his explosive gunpowder artworks. Not only using gunpowder cool in and of itself, but the very medium carries a profound and universal meaning. It is symbolic of tragedy and destruction that Qiang himself experienced in his childhood.
Nevertheless what makes his works unique is that he chooses to redefine the meaning of gunpowder by creating clouds of flowers and colourful, explosion-marked Roman statues.
Sure, with current technology, perhaps machines could surpass our creativity through speed, testing millions of combinations of various techniques to find patterns amongst the most appropriate, but this is computationally inefficient and a ways away.
Regardless, visual art is just one of countless examples of where context matters, where real, lived experiences as human beings and an understanding of the world is what enables us to not only appreciate stories but to tell them.
Honing our empathy 💛
Computers can create new hypotheses using existing scientific and mathematical principles, they can test possibilities we may never even think of. But computers can’t understand what it’s like to live as a human being or conceive of the experience of human suffering, at least not yet.
They may one day do so through regular in-depth analyses of our brainwaves, but in the meantime…
Only we can understand how to apply these new technologies in a way that will solve real, human problems.
Only we can empathize with the suffering that prejudice, injustice and unfairness causes to actively ensure we create meaningful and empowering systems.
Only we can understand the way AI and automation will transform our society, decide whether we want it to do so, and take action.
So what happened to the super human part?
When we think about what makes humans different, or what it really means to be human, we often think of empathy, emotion, critical thinking, knowledge integration and creativity.
And in all the things we covered, whether it’s the courage to persevere, the innovation of better technologies, or creating equitable systems for everyone, these all lean on those fundamental pillars of humanity.
This is where the future is going.
I’m terrified, but excited for this future. A future that challenges us to reach our full potential, to solve problems with empathy, to think creatively, to work collaboratively and feel more deeply.
While technology might bring cyborgs, flying cars or superman-level strength…
I think the real superhumans of the future will be those who are super human.
