Organically Irrelevant

In our mostly democratic, free-market existence, we’re seeing an alarming trend. The value of humanity is becoming more and more irrelevant. While we are holding on as long as we can to our importance, there are millions of people that are living fully replaceable existences. In fact, the trend seems to show that the bell curve of humanity is becoming more unremarkable. Without any real threat against such behavior, we can’t really blame us, either. Well, that threat is here now.

Multi-time best selling author, Yuval Noah Harari, warns that the next epoch on Earth will see a new star of the show. The star, of course, is our prized innovation: inorganic minds. Us, as a merely organic consciousness, will soon be ousted by the inorganic life we’ve given birth to in Silicon Valley. After all, the specific criteria we use to differentiate what makes being human valuable, he’d argue, is fully replicable with technology. Our pride and joy, individualism, is all but being replaced by algorithms that know us better than our parents know us, our doctors know us, and than we even know ourselves. We said humans are greater conscious beings because a computer could never beat a master human in chess. That wall crumbed years ago. We noted the divine brilliance of a baby’s ability to recognize the face of her mother as conscious superiority, while facial recognition technology now outpaces the human ability to perform the same task. While we’d like to assert that our “souls” and “spirits” makes us greater than the sum of our parts, all signs of our biology point to us being a complex algorithm with inputs and outputs only mildly more complex, for the time being, than our artificial intelligence counterparts.

Well, before we worry about the rise of the machines taking over the planet with technological violence like a Terminator, I think we ought to shift our focus to the much more passive takeover we’re seeing from technology happening all around us. For many of us, we might be lucky enough to live and die before we hit this technological tipping point, but future generations will undoubtably be faced with even greater responsibilities to differentiate. A great argument could be made that the role of inorganic thinkers, namely artificial intelligence, will have on traditionally human contributions to our societies.

With each passing day, the world is begging you to be a more viable contributor to the world around you. Specifically, underwriters, store clerks, people involved in retail in any capacity, and even pharmacists will soon be deemed fully irrelevant. More generally speaking, mediocrity in any undertaking may suffice today, but the pace of technology is pulling the rug from under such passive existences. In the future, whenever that may be, it’s the leaders, creators, and subject matter experts that will thrive. Then again, did we really need a nudge from technology to seek our best selves? This is all the more reason to get after it today.

 

Logan Gelbrich

@functionalcoach