Augmentation of Human Capacity

As well as replacing individual tasks AI and robots will become our assistants, boosting our capacities.

On Friday I did the opening keynote for the Mindshop Australia conference. The title was “Bringing the Future into your Advisory Practice”. The focus was on ways of creating more value for the clients of advisors in the network. After the session there was much discussion from participants on the nature of work and the sorts of jobs that they should encourage their children to be aiming for.

My response to those questions was to use examples to highlight principles rather than recommend specific jobs because jobs will change. I used the example of the health sector and new AI developments in my presentation as well as in the discussions afterwards. For example:

On the weekend I was then reading Stowe Boyd’s 10 work skills for the postnormal era and I was struck by the statement on “Freestyling” from Tyler Cohen:

“When humans team up with computers to play chess, the humans who do best are not necessarily the strongest players. They’re the ones who are modest, and who know when to listen to the computer. Often, what the human adds is knowledge of when the computer needs to look more deeply”

This married up with the response I was giving to participants at the conference. The use of AI systems to augment the capacities of humans does not augment everyone equally. In the world of medical specialists it is a commonly held view among patients that they will put up with specialists with poor social skills or high prices because of the knowledge they hold (putting aside the issues of the professions restricting supply to keep prices high).

If that knowledge moves largely to the realm of artificial intelligence then this re-weights the value of the medical specialist. If the machine can do things the individual or team cannot possibly do by being able to access more knowledge and make more connections in that knowledge than is humanly possible then it changes the system. Knowledge becomes less important and skills such as the capacity to work with the AI, patient empathy and general social skills become more important.

Augmentation of human cognitive capacities will do that across sectors and industries.