Living Digital - The Future is unevenly distributed

As a long-time fan boy of Science and Science Fiction, I have a favorite quote. It is by Science Fiction Pioneer and Visionary William Gibson and goes:

“The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.

William Gibson, The Economist, December 4, 2003”

I know this quote has been heavily used, and probably has lead to a lot of misunderstandings for lack of context. Here is my context.

Today, with this article, I am starting a Blog Series I call "Living Digital" to collect my thoughts and ideas about watching the digital evolution unfold from the early 1980 to now. I am doing this since there might be few insights that might be helpful to readers in dealing with the ever escalating disruption brought to our lives. I will also add some speculation and throw out some ideas, since I sometimes see trends and connections before others or before they materialize.

Today's focus is on our mind, our human nature, our very sentience, and the risk presented by the digital transformation of everything, including our own humanity.

From the dawn of writing and philosophy, our understanding of the human mind and of human nature has been heavily influenced by our understanding of technology. The ancient Greeks through of the mind as a hydraulic system. In the Middle Ages, people thought of minds as mechanical systems, governed by a spirit/soul or a soul. Other models followed: From clockworks, to now, computers and networks.

Efforts are under way to "digitize" humanity, seeking for ways to achieve digital immortality, uploading our minds into the cloud, implanting neural network into the brain etc. While all of this is very interesting and fascinating and sometimes downright scary, it is heavily driven by technocrats, nerds and geeks. Hardly a philosopher or psychologist works in the digital innovation labs. It is an emerging field, and the topic of Digital Ethics is just now starting to become a main stream area of interest to technology companies that strive to automate everything including the human mind.

But here is the catch. We are still stuck in a deterministic, reductionist world-view that tries to capture the human spirit by digitally confining it into a technology bottle. But humans don't work that way. Humans are fuzzy. Fickle and emotional. Inconsistent. Changing all the time. Influenced by pheromones, bacterial emanations, hormones, glucose levels, sports events. Most of the time, we are not rational or logical at all. Habits and motivations around status, belonging, security, fairness, rewards, recognition, as well as nasty things such as envy, greed and revenge make us hard to define and even harder to control.

When the internet started, we all thought this will "liberate" us, because now anyone would be able to learn anything they wanted, anytime, at near zero cost. We would evolve into digitally educated super-humans and everything would we peachy and swell.

We were so wrong.

The human genie does not want to be predictably confined to a single, digital bottle. Instead of a single source of universal truth for everyone, we have entered a post-truth society where it is nearly impossible to distinguish fabricated information from "real" information. The only choice we have is to fall back into our non-digital heritage evolved over millions of years. Connections. Tribalism, Trust. Leadership. Reciprocity. Fairness. Empathy. Gut feeling. And, as a corollary, we present easy prey to the black-belt con-artists that know how to play our primordial emotional keyboard with the virtuosity of a concert maestro. Like Mark Twain said: "It is easier to fool people than to convince people they have been fooled." And now we are giving this playing field of malleable human minds to the evolving digital machinery of Artificial Intelligence running on vast data lakes that store everything about us. The Future is already here. Including Artificial Trolling, Con-Artistry and Fraud. It is here, and it is still not evenly distributed. But it won't take long.

Is that the Future we want? What is the alternative?

Humans, just like the internet, are networks. We look for connection. Similarity and belonging. "Like" has the same root as "alike". We look for nodes of compatible interaction. A single disconnected computer cannot deliver a valuable contribution to an internet. A single disconnected human cannot deliver a valuable connection to a society. As technologists, as Innovation Managers, we need to understand this, accept this and own up to it. We need to develop our technologies in this direction. Instead of just blindly barreling down the one-way street of ever escalating levels of automation, trying to remove the human element from the equation purely for reasons of efficiency and profit, we might want to start looking at how to foster the co-evolution of humans and machines. AI today is defined as "Artificial Intelligence. In the Future (hopefully) AI might be defined as Augmented Intelligence, where humans and machines are working in a symbiosis. Not trying to digitally eliminate, but to leveraging the strength of our humanity: With all it's fuzziness, with the emotions, the playful creativity, the inconsistencies, the surprises. The love and joy.

Living Digital does not have to mean to surrender our humanity. But we must take steps before the Human Genie decides to smash the digital bottle to replace it with flash mobs of torches and pitchforks.