If we take a glance at human history and progression to how we got to where we are now, we can understand our progression though a series of revolutions in which technology has progressively freed us from limitations we faced across time.
The Cognitive revolution gave us language, storytelling, and an ability to cooperate around our ideas and abstract thoughts. The Agricultural Revolution gave us to a great extent freedom from uncertainty of hunting and gathering. The Industrial Revolution helped us with physical labour through inventions of machines and the Digital Revolution transformed how we process, store and exchange information.
With the Artificial Intelligence revolution, we are entering a period in which technology will be automating a lot of cognitive labour and repetitive processes. And perhaps, paradoxically, lead us into a full circle moment.
For thousands of years, human progress has been about creating technologies that allow us to spend less time doing what we must do and more time doing what we choose to do.
Perhaps a closer look.
My grandparent’s priority was largely about survival and security. Work hard, put food on the table, build a home and give my parents an opportunity to receive an education.
My parents’ generation took on a different challenge on the foundation laid by their parents. Work was still about providing but also about building a decent standard of living, educating the next generation and creating greater stability than my grandparent’s generation.
For my generation, the challenge evolved again. We talk more about building a legacy and creating something that outlives us and gives our children opportunities that we may not have had.
Considering the trend, It is likely that the next generation will inherit something completely different from my generation. If our previous generations worked to survive, provide and build, future generations will likely work to find meaning, create experiences and prioritize self-fulfilment.
This is where the next Revolution becomes particularly interesting.
The question shouldn’t just be “what jobs will AI replace” but “what will we do with the human capacity that technology gives back to us?”
The answers may be found in the qualities that technology struggles to replicate in the fullest human context, which is empathy, trust, leadership, courage, curiosity, emotional intelligence, relationships and the ability to understand what matters to another human being.
As technology becomes increasingly capable of performing everyday tasks, the value of the human will increasingly lie in understanding purpose, and this could very well fundamentally change the way we work today.
We have always measured our productivity by how much we could produce in a given amount of time, but the future may place more value on how effectively we collaborate, influence, lead, create and solve more ambiguous problems.
The great irony is that the more technology progresses, the more valuable we as humans may become.
We began with the Cognitive Revolution where we sat together, shared stories, imagined possibilities and made meaning from the world arounds, and with thousands of years of technological progress designed to help us survive, produce and accomplish greater feet’s, technology is now taking on all that work and information processing. This is likely leading us forward to where we started.
So perhaps the ultimate goal of technology is not to make us more like machines but to remind us of what it really feels like to be human.
Control Lead – Santam
Ambassador: Impact & Transformation – Insurance Institute of Gauteng
