Desire > Intention > Action

A few months ago, I shared some personal reflections on how AI could cause also these two side effects:

The first point is the emergence of human intention as a new space for value creation. Intention is what remains when AI absorbs all the doing and action, which follows intention.

The second point I made concerns the definition and reevaluation of what doing and action mean in the age of AI and their impact on human activity.

I see a spectrum that consists of three moments: 1) the moment of desire, followed by 2) the moment of intention, and finally, 3) the moment of action, which is at one end of this spectrum.

Before continuing to share my thoughts, I must say that I have received, from time to time, some constructive criticism about how these theoretical patterns or models can become more useful to people. Specifically, how do we move from a theoretical point of view to something practical that we can put into action, such as in product design or other areas where this type of thinking could add value?

What I have to offer at the moment is that I don't have all the answers ready as to how theory translates into practice. However, I do believe that many things start from a point of thinking. My approach is to leverage thinking as the instigation for my action. Therefore, please understand if I sometimes share thoughts that may sound either abstract or overly simplistic. Perhaps they are at times, though even very simple thoughts can hold significant meaning, depending on what thoughts we're discussing.

With what I’ve shared, I want to elaborate a bit more on this model. I should clarify that it’s not really a scientific model or even a proven one; it’s simply a model I conceived because I noticed how AI tools are shifting certain types of activities from human action to human intention. This thought has stayed with me for a while, and recently I revisited it. I think about it often and sometimes use it to evaluate how AI is causing changes and transforming many aspects of our activities—whether personal, professional, or otherwise. The model goes like this:

Desire is part of our human dimension, along with the feelings associated with it. It is not even a mental activity; it exists in the domain of passion. Desire is a very powerful driver in our day-to-day lives and leads to intention. Sometimes intention may arise from other instigating factors—perhaps more mental, intellectual, or even survivalist. Overall, humans are entities driven by desires, and intentions do lead to actions, to making decisions and doing something specific.

We are now in a situation where AI and all the emerging AI tools are changing the speed of action. AI is accelerating the pace of our actions, and we see most of the disruption and transformation happening in the ‘action space’—a vast space encompassing a variety of activities. This space is multidimensional, representing many types of activities from personal to professional, collaborative to individual, and short-term to long-term. It is also where we humans expend a considerable amount of energy, both mental and physical, as well as time—both of which are finite resources.

Additionally, we can consider that desires and intentions may have an infinite quality, depending on the mental and psychological state of individuals. One can have hundreds of desires and intentions per day, but only a small subset of these can be converted into action.

And so, this is where AI comes into the spotlight in my thought process, influencing the multiple fields of action I presented in the model. These fields of action are now being disrupted by AI, as well as by all the other after-effects of applying AI to such actions—such as the dimension of speed, the generative dimension, improvisation, and the narrowing of the path from thought to output.

One could hypothesise that as we gradually outsource action to AI, we may be shifting our attention and energy more toward the earlier points in the spectrum: the points of desire and intention.

But behind our intentions are desires fueling them, which brings us to an interesting thought: If we can supercharge our actions through AI tools that accelerate our outputs, we may end up putting more energy and time into the instigators of action rather than the action itself. I also mentioned the potential infinite nature of the desire/intention space.

Let’s pause for a moment. Some of you might question this model, perhaps thinking it's too simplistic and that life isn't really like this—and I agree. Our reality is indeed more complex. However, we still need simple models to create meaning and provide some sort of structure or reference so that we can better understand and elaborate on the changes we observe around us. By inventing these theoretical models, we demonstrate our ability to reason about these changes, and thus, we can potentially be more intentional about how these changes occur and how we might influence or even design them.

And this brings me to my final point. We also live within a financial dimension because many of our activities are underpinned by financial considerations in the way our societies operate today. When we intersect the financial reality with the model of Desire > Intention > Action, and if we are shifting more towards Desire and Intention from a human perspective, this raises the question of whether new financial incentives will increasingly align with those earlier stages in the model/spectrum. If human activity is shifting towards desire and intention, is this where the future economy will be headed?

In other words, if we consider capitalism as being based on finite resources—such as time, material resources, commodities, land, and so forth—and with production as a primary dimension of capitalism, are we now looking at the emergence of a new model that is not associated with the traditional notion of capitalism? Does this imply that when we talk about transformation, whether digital or otherwise, we are also witnessing a transformation of economic systems?

Do you think AI will disrupt capitalism because we may shift towards creating wealth out of desire and intention? In other words, it’s not what we do or our actions that will hold the most value in the future—because activity and production could become just another commodity driven by AI processes, automation, robotics, and so on. Finally, consider what products and services might potentially supercharge this future economy of desire and intention.

Yannis Paniaras