Technology, AI, and what it means to be human — asking the big questions
It has been a fascinating few days here in the Bay Area. I’m grateful to my fellow Young Global Leader Soulaima Gourani for putting on a fantastic display of some of the most innovative thinkers and doers in the field of AI and human-centered leadership. From the incredible work of Del Seymour and his work in providing support to homeless people in downtown San Francisco through Code Tenderloin, to amazing people doing important work using technology to solve social problems, and Stanford HAI professors trying to put the ‘human’ into AI, it has been a brief snapshot into some of the most important questions being put to humanity right now.
One takeaway from the experience was the idea that AI will only solve problems in so far as we ask the right questions. The advent of AI is calling into question so much of what we hold dear and treasure within the human experience.
If machines are poised to take over so much of what makes us useful, what is left for us to do as people?
In my work, I like to dig deep. As an artist and deep spiritual thinker, I am not afraid of asking the big questions. And ask those big questions we must. So much of what I saw these past few days posed only one big question for me — why? Why are we doing this? For what purpose? And to what end?
So much of what you see here in Silicon Valley appears to be innovation for innovation’s sake — it seems to be about who can get to market first with the biggest, shiniest new toy. And which one of your buddies will invest in your project, irrespective of it’s meaningful contribution to mankind. There sometimes seems to be little ‘higher order’ thinking into the true nature of creativity and what all this innovation is, in fact, for.
Stanford professor James Landay gave countless examples of innovations that were not rooted in the real world. A failure to take into account the user in the pursuit of the next big thing. Innovations that had little real world application and, even worse, were unprepared for the negative unintended outcomes. But I think it goes even deeper than that. If we really are now equipped with exponentially powerful tools, then we really have to start asking ourselves the exponentially outsized questions.
What problems in the world should we be trying to solve with technology?
Let’s take Uber for example. Many people would hail Uber as the ultimate innovation that ‘disrupted’ the system and I don’t deny it can be useful to hail a cab when needed. But, at the end of the day, Uber is just a ride share company. The service it provides, whilst enabling our lives to be just that little bit easier, is hardly going to change the world at a fundamental level. One of my fellow YGLs commented that one of the positive, unintended consequences of Uber was that it freed up Saudi Arabian women to be able to go out. Whilst that is doubtless a huge step forward for the freedom of women inthe Middle East, it is hardly changing the root causes of inequality. It attacks merely the SYMPTOMS of some of our biggest problems, but not the CAUSES. We need more than just incremental innovation. And we really need to ‘dig deeper’ into the root causes of the very problems we are trying to solve. Yes, that might sound like a lofty goal but if we are serious about harnessing the power of technology and AI, we have to make sure we are asking the right questions about what it is we are solving FOR.
If you don’t ask the big questions, how can you achieve outsized results?
If your premise is small, you can only make incremental changes. But it’s not just about rethinking how we are using technology into the future. Deeper questions can inform the design process on things we are working on now. They can first lead us to question the essential PURPOSE of a new innovation and ask radical questions about it’s true contribution to humanity BEFORE it receives disproportionate amounts of investment. And secondly, those fundamental questions can inform the design process in a much more fundamental way when it is deemed the product is indeed the right thing to bring to the market.
What certainly wasn’t addressed, or at least not sufficiently for me, was larger questions of what all this tech means for human development itself. The idea that all this tech will free up humans to be more ‘creative’ was bandied around somewhat, but there was little meaningful conversation about what this meant and what humans should be focusing on right now in their own development. I have no doubt that the advent of AI heralds a lot of opportunity that can empower humanity’s potential. But I do believe that in order to reach the full potential of the technology, we need to be asking much deeper questions of ourselves to inform how we can most take advantage of these giant leaps for mankind.
I believe that if we are going to invest in the technology — the ‘hardware’ — we need to put equal if not more emphasis on ‘the software’, the upskilling of humans to not only take advantage of the opportunities that AI presents, but to exponentially unfold THEIR own potential so that these rocket-fuelled innovations in tech are just the foundations of what human beings are able to achieve. Tech can only ever be an enabler, it can never be the goal itself.
To my mind, all this now gives us the incredible opportunity to really invest in human potential, if so much of what humans used to do can now be automatised.
Technology should be able to free up humans to answer the bigger questions in life and to invest more in the development of people.
Where once we felt that education, life-long learning, engagement in the arts and other creative pursuits, and spending time on reflective, ‘higher order’ thinking felt like a luxury, the advent of AI should free up space and time — and resources — to invest much more in our own human, and some might say, spiritual, development. Indeed, that pursuit of meaning and spiritual development can and should be THE goal in our lives from now onwards.
Someone suggested that we need a concentration on ‘civics’ — I totally agree, but let’s ensure that doesn’t continue to be an intellectual experience but a deeply felt ‘whole body’ experience that marries the head and the heart. We need to invest so much more now in learning experiences that get to the core of what it means to be human and ensure that our ideas of personal and professional development align with the highest level of ethics and civil and social responsibility. We need those conversations around ‘civics’ to be embodied in actual, practical impact that create extraordinary opportunities for all.
Caroline Watson is the founder of The Centre for the Arts and Global Leadership, a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, a disruptive thinker, entrepreneur, actor, speaker, consultant, writer and visionary change maker. Not afraid to ask the big questions, Caroline works at the powerful intersection of the arts, global leadership and deep thinking about our individual and collective futures.
