Idiosyncracy! The Future of Success

Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Singularity[1].

The robots are coming! The robots are coming! Robofobia is all the rage these days. They’re smarter, more efficient, require less maintenance, and coming for a job near you – in fact, your job – because they are better, faster, cheaper[2]. If you’re an employer, what’s not to like? If you’re an employee, what’s to fear, they can never match your creativity, you emotional intelligence, or your very, very special humanity, right?  But what if it were to turn out that they could match us in these ways, what then?  Where would we place our faith in our value and difference?

Today, a common idol of the tribe[3] is that humans are and will always be different from, superior to, and dominant over robots. Arguments range from the divine to the scientific in defense of this proposition and the evidence ranges from the presence of the divine in our souls, made in god’s image, and given dominion over the earth to they will never have emotions, emotional intelligence, (self-) consciousness, or creativity.

I’m not going to discuss matters of personal religious faith but with regards to the scientific arguments of human difference, superiority, and the limits of robots let us see what we can learn.

I frequently recall the day Charles Hertzfeld, a former Deputy Director of ARPA who funded the development of the ARPANET – a precursor to today’s Internet[4] - claimed that everything is a commodity except creativity. Hmm… to be sure Dr Hertzfeld is brilliant man and prescient in his view of technology but was he right that day?

On creativity, if we accept a common definition that it is the combination of existing ideas in new ways[5], is it true that computers (a proxy for a robotic “brain”) are unable to perform such combinatorial work? Nearly 20 years ago in 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue beat the reigning chess champion. How? Through pure brute force of combinatorial generation of possible moves, counter moves, and analysis of most likely successful outcomes from each move, that’s how.

Now extrapolate on the increases in computer power along with advances in programming over the last 2 decades[6][7]. Who believes humans can match the raw storage of ideas to be used in creative efforts, the speed at which those ideas can be combined, or the efficiency with which they can be evaluated by computers[8]? So if computers can create, then the question becomes when, if ever, they will match humans in this regard?

On consciousness or self-consciousness, where do computers stand[9]? Serious Artificial Intelligence scientists are beginning to talk in all sincerity about this becoming possible[10][11][12]. Very recently, at Rensselaer Polytechic Institute, a robot has “passed” the classic test of self-awareness[13] - it was admittedly a rudimentary demonstration and limited to a “programmed” context. However, if we apply the same law of increasing technological capability we have seen in all other elements of computing, is it so hard to imagine the pace of improvement or the moment when they “match" humans in this regard?

Ah, they may be creative and become self-aware but they will never develop or possess emotions and even less so emotional intelligence, right? Well … what is one significant component of emotional intelligence? The ability to “sense” the emotional state of those around us and to respond in pro-social ways[14]. And precisely how do humans sense these emotional states of others? Why verbal cues – what is said, what is not said, the tone of voice, the inflections, the loudness, non-verbal cues – facial expressions, gesticulations, posture, etc., and overt behaviors that are not verbal or non-verbal cues.

So what about the capacity for sensing these inputs to emotional intelligence? Computers can sense the emotional content of speech both from the semantic analysis of content as text and the audio characteristics of voice[15]. They can recognize the emotions expressed in faces[16][17]. And on the recognition of body language and gesticulations front, what can they do? Why, yes, they can sense and make sense of those too[18][19].

Okay, so they can sense the emotional states of those (humans) around them but surely they can’t respond properly in pro-social ways! Wrong again, they can[20][21] .

So we have lost ground on creativity, self-consciousness, and emotional intelligence as the preeminent sources of singularly human characteristics. Computers are good and will only get better at that absurd and uniquely machine-based pace – doubling in capability every two years. Where oh where might we find our last best hope for the unique and superior human character?

We do have our completely unique genetic composition. But we also now know that genetics is not destiny, only a set of possibilities – potential outcomes that may or may not become expressed. It is only when this composition is combined with experience[22][23] that we create an utterly unique set of responses to the circumstance, settings, and contexts in which we find ourselves.

We do mature, that is, we age and die and, as a result, we experience the world as mortals. Even the ancient Greeks and Woody Allen knew that our sense of our mortality has a huge impact upon us and colors our judgment more and more as we age and become aware of it – computers like the Greek gods before them will likely never know or feel this. Yet, although we respond to this mortality in differing ways, the fact of our mortality is still a collective similarity not an individual difference. It is our experience of mortality and how it colors our thinking, feeling, and behaving that is individually unique.

We are hard wired with cognitive biases[24]. These lend us a known irrationality and contribute yet another form of inconsistent behavior to our uniquely human character. These are, however, somewhat universal among humans and, therefore, unique to us collectively but not individually. It is when our more or less universal tendencies towards specific cognitive biases interact with a specific perception of data, inference from data, or decision that the our collective cognitive biases become a source of individual differentiation.

So there are common cognitive biases that bind us and to which computers lay no claim. However, many would say that “deficiency” is among their advantages – in fact, many would say it is among the greatest advantages they have. There is our mortality of which computers can have no experience, lending an additional layer of complexity to our emotional life . There is our genetic composition in which unimaginable potential for individual variation exists and for which there seems to be no computer equivalent. All of these are opportunities for human uniqueness and possible bases for superiority over robots if that is what you seek.

However, I would claim that the one thing that is actually truly unique to each of us as humans is this: experience. It is the thing that causes even genetically identical twins to diverge from one another[25]. Experience is the single thing we can claim as entirely unique to each and every one of us. Experience is that which makes us idiosyncratic and even more so when combined with genetic composition, mortality, and cognitive biases.

In the brave new world lying just around the next turn of the screw, when we all are working side by side with the robots sent to relieve us of the mundane labors with which we currently fill our time, rest easy knowing that you deserve a place at the conference table not because you are more creative, emotionally intelligent, or possess a higher degree of self-consciousness than robots but rather because you are flawed, biased, mortal, and possess a completely unique set of experiences. In short, you are idiosyncratic.

In this you will find your advantage and will be able contribute value that cannot be replicated by machines. So, if you wish to increase your value for the future and in the workplaces you will inhabit then diversify, diversify, and diversify more your experiences. Embrace and cherish your flaws and mortality. Nurture and cultivate your idiosyncrasy! You too can learn to stop worrying and love the singularity.

[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/ethics/signs-of-the-singularity

[2] https://hbr.org/2014/12/what-happens-to-society-when-robots-replace-workers

[3] https://www.sirbacon.org/links/4idols.htm

[4] https://internethalloffame.org/inductees/charles-herzfeld

[5] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/combinatorial-creativity-and-the-myth-of-originality-114843098/?no-ist

[6] https://www.popsci.com/content/computing

[7] https://ourworldindata.org/data/technology-and-infrastructure/moores-law-other-laws-of-exponential-technological-progress/

[8] https://www.fastcompany.com/3027293/how-creative-can-computers-be

[9] https://user.das.ufsc.br/~rabelo/Ensino/DAS6607/Artigos-Gerais/ArtificialConsciousness.pdf

[10] https://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/dvm/papers/conscioushb.pdf

[11] https://www.technologyreview.com/news/531146/what-it-will-take-for-computers-to-be-conscious/

[12] https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-06-09/scientists-are-starting-worry-about-conscious-machines-movie-transcendence

[13] https://www.sciencealert.com/a-robot-has-just-passed-a-classic-self-awareness-test-for-the-first-time

[14] https://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/emotional-intelligence

[15] https://www.informatik.uni-augsburg.de/lehrstuehle/hcm/projects/tools/emovoice/

[16] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16765997

[17] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/bad-news-computers-are-getting-better-than-we-are-at-facial-recognition/372377/

[18] https://crpit.com/confpapers/CRPITV36Gunes.pdf

[19] https://www.ruor.uottawa.ca/handle/10393/23468

[20] https://vismod.media.mit.edu/tech-reports/TR-538.pdf

[21] https://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/ai/ahuman-read-only/research/articles/Emotions/Computer%20Recognition%20and%20Simulation%20of%20Emotion.pdf

[22] https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/environmental-influences-on-gene-expression-536

[23] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1855137/

[24] https://www.businessinsider.com/cognitive-biases-2014-6

[25] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2899491/