Generative AI needs a Creative Human Touch

Generative artificial intelligence and?extended reality?are powerful tools that can help address pressing societal challenges and business problems by augmenting, expanding, and extending the human experience rather than replicating or replacing it. IMO, it’s what (re)defines exponentiality in the Experience (Exponential) Economy. Or, I’ve called it loftier things i.e. the first Singularity of our times – ode to Marvel fans out there! But think about it – our realities r being warped as we speak; and value-creation will never be the same. Cue: Generative AI. While humans, humanity spend more (and more) time in the ‘verse, we (rather, our avatars) obtain ?‘superhuman’ powers, kinda omni-present really. If I can impactthe virtual world ‘more’ than, or shall we say, what’s left of the real-world.. why would I choose the (blue, red) pill? Crypto was an orange-pill, wasn’t it now?

To succeed with generative artificial intelligence and extended reality, we should harness human creativity, curiosity, and compassion.

Exponentiality on steroids is ChatGPT taking weeks and days to self-improve. We all heard about Metcalfe’s Law; phones, the Internet, crypto, now Virtual Worlds – each human invention taking shorter (exponentially) times to hit ‘critical mass’. Then my pessimistic belief that when we all become ‘super’ – as Syndrome says – nobody is. We instead, should focus on the best (what’s left) of our humanity! As the popular saying goes – every other machine is taken!

Therefore, the businesses that find success with these technologies will be the ones that also harness human-centric capabilities such as creativity, curiosity, and compassion, according to MIT Sloan senior lecturerPaul McDonagh-Smith.

The key is figuring out how humans and machines can best work together, resulting in humans’ abilities being multiplied, rather than divided, by machines’ capabilities – we should be LONG Humanity and #AI (not Short x OR).. Bless those Venn diagrams. ?C’mon we’ve seen it validated in the movies: Jarvis! The hottest job today = prompt engineers (AI whisperers if you will). But the existentiality

The thinking goes, if we wish to create the sustainable, robust, profitable, productive orgs of tomorrow, we need to amplify and propagate our human capabilities through our internal and external networks- this is Andrew Chen’s Cold Start Problem (https://www.amazon.com/Cold-Start-Problem-Andrew-Chen/dp/0062969749) ?playing out right before our eyes!

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As we enter the ExponentialAge it’s really not about focusing on the differences between humans and machines , rather the synergies and ways in which they can be unified and united – always remember, we need to be LONG-AND not SHORT-OR. This is the only way/scenario (as Dr Strange saw with the Eye of Agamotto..) that humanity will reach the stars (vs facing extinction and obsolescene stranded on the 3rd rock from the Sun).

Human Creativity is the Way Forward..

Over the past half century, society has experienced two digital revolutions. The first was in communications, taking us from analog phones to the internet. The second was in computation, which introduced personal computers and smartphones. Together, they’ve fundamentally changed how we work and live – then we had crypto (I’m a HODLer) and now GenerativeAI and VirtualWorlds.

Now we’ve entered a third digital revolution, built around creativity..it’s up to humans to add the “creativity quotient” to use technologies like generative AI to their full potential. For orgs, this means creating processes, practices, and policies that empower people to be creative to maximize the power of transformative technologies.

Boosting human (our) creativity quotient will optimise the use of large language models and generative AI – and it will also put all of us in a much better place in terms of how we interface with AI and technology in general.”

Focusing on human creativity has other advantages beyond serving as a foundation for multimodal generative AI in business networks. Human creativity is critical to delivering cross-disciplinary insights and making connections between domains, which will enable AI to generate sustainable competitive advantage.

The scenario is similar for extended reality (XR) – human curiosity (ode to Jobs in the speech) will be essential for thinking of ways to bridge the world of bits and bytes with the world of atoms and molecules – giving us hybrid intelligence – which could eventually morph into artificial general intelligence (AGI). This is our last chance to shape the trajectory of AI’s unprecented, undeniable (and still, organic) growth!

Assets, (human, machine) experiences, and identities cultivated in today’s physical domains will cross over into digital contexts, and it’s up to people to unite the two = hybrid.. or phygital. In short – it’s the birth of a new species on Earth. Sentient or not.

To guard against bias, users will also need to develop an “immersive curiosity” — a foundational skill that rejects bias and results in increased discretionary efforts, Immersive curiosity is also instrumental to improving outcomes, weakening the status quo, and opening up new opportunities, whether a business is seeking out new target audiences or carving out new segments.

Turbocharging Creativity..

To increase CQ (Creativity Quotient), orgs might want to explore the following:

Start now.?If orgs wait until the technology has evolved to the next phase, they are going to miss the boat. The best time to get started is always, now..

Build a cross-functional team of teams.?Siloed, functional approaches aren’t in sync with the digital economy, which relies on different skills and diversity of thought. Digital transformation needs to be a team sport – also it needs to be re-thought as Business Transformation, or even more objectively/natively, how humanity solves complex problems – activating higher Purpose e.g. existentiality and the pressing climate agenda

Make compassion part of the mix.?Proactively engineer diversity, equity, and inclusion into digital solutions from the discovery phase through the design, delivery, and data-informed evolution phases.

We need to put more of the human into our robots and machines. We need to make sure they’re representing the best of who we are and can become as a species. If you forget everything else, just choose LONG x AND vs SHORT x OR!?