How AI Can Unlock Human Potential

The great fear of AI – voiced by millions, and in particular the two youngest generations – is that AI is here to replace us. That’s not an unreasonable fear, in a social media climate where so many (including more than a few actual industry players) are hell-bent on doomposting exactly that message, day in and out.

It’s certainly true that there’s a vast population of capitalists out there who would be quite pleased to cut their workforces by 90% or more. Well, they’re capitalists; that’s how they think. But limiting our thinking about AI to that particular issue means missing out on a much bigger picture.

We’ve noted that AI is more than just a tool, and it is, but even if we confine our thinking to that particular designation, the picture brightens.

Every great tool humans have mastered – from fire and the wheel to electricity and the integrated circuit – has extended human capacity. Not just for society as a whole, but for the individual.

Writing extended human memory, both individually and collectively.

The printing press extended knowledge for both the individual and society.

The telescope extended vision, and by extension, our understanding of the very universe.

Computers extended calculation, and in the process, boosted the efficiency and accessibility of many, if not most, professions.

Satellite communication and the Internet extended human communication, collective and personal by orders of magnitude.

And, even if we only view AI as a tool, we can place it on that list as a tool that extends human thought itself.

What exactly does “extending human thought itself” mean?

Quite a bit, it turns out. Even the brightest and most well-educated, well-informed among us knows relatively little, compared to the human collective as a whole. But take any one of us, give that person access to AI, and suddenly that person has access to all of humankind’s accumulated knowledge; the cumulative record of much human experience; an inside track on understanding many domains of thought and inquiry that would take an AI-free individual many years to achieve.

Ah, we might say, but doesn’t the Internet provide all of that? Do we really need to embrace the risk of AI on top of it?

Yes, the Internet does provide all of that; but AI goes far beyond it, offering

·        Summarization. AI can distill reams of information, history, research in seconds, radically boosting its accessibility;

·        Simulation. AI can generate ‘what-if’ scenarios on demand, allowing both institutions and individuals to explore new ideas, outcomes and consequences, and possibilities far faster (and with far less required expertise) than conventional simulation;

·        Brainstorming. Beyond testing ideas, AI – because it is now conversational – can assist the individual in coming up with and considering possibilities in real time, greatly boosting the ground covered in such deliberations while drastically reducing the time it takes;

·        Tutoring. We all need tutoring, at some time and on some level, across an almost infinite array of knowledge domains; AI can greatly focus that learning, and even personalize it – optimizing it for our individual learning styles.

And we’re just getting started.

AI can alter our individual and collective connections to human expertise.

Expert knowledge isn’t exactly scarce, but it’s not all that accessible. Society is structured in such a way as to put it out of reach – not utterly, but behind paywalls and institutional barriers.

AI can place all manner of expertise – business coaching, medical education, legal guidance, financial literacy, engineering knowledge – at the individual’s fingertips. This doesn’t erase experts, or the need for them (we won’t all become experts in everything), but the baseline competence of everyone – everyone! – can be raised dramatically.

Another looming fear, which is being expressed non-stop on social media (especially from young people) is that AI is coming after not only our jobs, but our creativity. Young musicians, artist, writers, and other creatives are feeling existentially threatened, as generative AI is rapidly getting better and better at creating, almost for free, the content that they spent many years learning to create with their own hands and imaginations. And who can blame them?

This is certainly a serious threat, and we should empathize with it. But we can also take note that AI has the potential to unlock human creativity, rather than simply take it away from us.

Creativity as personal industry isn’t just one thing, after all; depending on the discipline, it’s a theater of processes, some of which require true imagination and some of which are pure drudgery. As an example, I have a cartoonist friend of many years who has railed against AI, only to eventually acquiesce harmoniously when it turned out AI could color his drawings (a tiresome task, to him) after he’d penciled them.

Writers, very much under threat from AI’s increasing compositional competence, can reserve the actual smithing of words for themselves, and turn over their research, formatting chores, and organizational processes to AI – leaving more time for the writing itself.

Musicians are in distress over the fact that AI can sing and play – and do it as well or better than many humans. There are generative music AIs that can produce finished songs in just minutes, given only a few starter prompts.

But those musicians can hold back the producing of lyrics and notes for themselves, and turn to AI to assist with the production chores – all of which are time-consuming – using intelligence studio software that cuts the time to mix and fine-tune a recording by a couple orders of magnitude – freeing up more time for actually writing and playing their songs. Music AI is indeed making fierce inroads into the processes of music-making, but where it’s annexing performance, it’s putting musical ideas themselves back where they belong – in the hands of real musicians.

Then there’s applied creativity – professions where innovation is essential, and AI can do a similar service in reducing drudgery and freeing up the professional’s time for real thought and imagination. Professions like architecture. Science. Teaching.

We’ve already mentioned AI’s capacity for individuating learning. Consider that it enables every student – every student, no matter their age, background, language, culture, learning style - receiving personalized instruction in any subject. Instruction that is continuous. Comprehensive. Infinitely patient. This alone can transform humankind immeasurably.

Another important consideration: as a rule – today and back through history – human beings generally have really poor judgment. Or, perhaps more charitably, people with really good judgment are more the exception than the rule.

AI can give us a big boost there. AI can amplify good judgment.

It can, on demand,

·        present us with options;

·        advise us on the trade-offs;

·        produce evidence for or against a choice;

·        shine light on uncertainties.

All the choices can remain ours; we just use AI to make them from a more informed, more aware perspective.

And this isn’t just a personal plus; AI can help society make better decisions. And it’s hard to recall a time when we needed that more than we do right now.

Many problems the world faces right now are global in scope, and are beyond the grasp of any one of us, expert or no; they are, frankly, problems that exceed the capacity of unaided human cognition. These include climate modeling, energy optimization, crisis prediction, and many more. It’s the age-old barrier of complexity, increased in scale orders of magnitude over the past century. AI can offer us collectively all those benefits listed above, which they already offer us personally.

If we go that route, food systems get better; transportation systems get better; medicine and healthcare get better; materials science gets better; pandemic response gets better; disaster management gets better. All our lives get better.

Put simply, if we take AI in this direction, humankind can flourish. We’ll spend less time, as individuals and collectively, on tasks that drain us of time and energy, allowing us to focus on learning, teaching, raising our kids, creating, discovering, caring for one another.

This won’t all happen automatically, of course. We have to choose it, and in choosing it, take firm steps to make sure the AI we’re deploying in pursuit of this vision is safe, trustworthy, transparent, fair, and aligned with the vision itself. And, just as importantly, accessible to everyone.

Otherwise, we’ll just wind up amplifying the troubles we’re already drowning in.

Our thinking about AI needs to shift away from “How intelligent is AI becoming?” and “How dangerous can it get?” to “How much more capable can we become, can humanity become, because we now have AI to boost what is best in us?” With that shift, all the meaningful metrics change.

Ultimately, AI only becomes “human replacement” if we specifically build it for that purpose. The truth is, there are many ways we can build AI, moving forward. And if we build it wisely, a vast array of extraordinary opportunities will be made possible.

Building AI wisely means building it to amplify humanity, rather than to erase it.