Economic trends
Staying Human –
and Humane
“We stand on the brink of a technological revolution that will
fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one
another. In its scale, scope, and complexity, the transformation
will be unlike anything humankind has experienced before.”
T
he Fourth Industrial Revolution was the
theme closely focussed on at Davos
2016, the World Economic Forum’s
annual meeting which attracted some
2500 business, government and civil
society leaders from 100 countries to the event in
Klosters in Switzerland.
At Davos, the global (RED) campaign to help people fight HIV
and AIDS marked its 10th anniversary. Over the past decade,
(RED) has raised more than $350 million with the help of 65
companies. “Where you live should not decide if you live,” said
Bono, Lead Singer, U2; Co-Founder of (RED) and Co-Founder
of ONE, Ireland.
Major public-private initiatives were launched at the Annual
Meeting, including a $50 million commitment to secure access to
education for refugee children and a $130 million initiative to cut
food waste and loss by half globally. The International Committee
of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Belgian government released a
social investment tool to help more than 60 million persons with
disabilities.
Retaining essence
As the world surges into the exponentially unfolding Fourth
Industrial Revolution – a new age of interactive technologies,
artificial intelligence and automation – a key challenge for
individuals will be to understand and retain their very essence,
their humanity, leading scientists and thought leaders on society
and law said in the closing panel session of the World Economic
Forum Annual Meeting 2016.
Being able to master the technologies of the Fourth Industrial
Revolution must be an essential part of that, the panellists agreed.
“We are competing with artificial intelligence,” asserted meeting
co-chair Amira Yahyaoui, Founder and Chair of citizens action
group Al Bawsala in Tunisia and a member of the World
Economic Forum’s Global Shaper community of leaders in their
twenties. “We really have to show we are the good ones. So the
discussion of ethics and value has never been more essential than
it is today.”
Justine Cassell, Associate Dean, Technology, Strategy and
Impact, in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon
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University in the US, countered: “I don’t think of robots as
competitors. I think of them as collaborators to help us do what
we wish to do but can’t do alone and help us to be part of a
larger community.”
Robots
Robots and artificial intelligence will force people to hone human
skills that were much more important generations ago in the days
of very low tech. “Empathy, respect – those skills will be effective
for the workplace of the future,” Cassell reckoned. “It is through
comparison with robots that we will know what it is to be human.”
“We are the wine and not the bottles,” Greely stressed. “I have
a metal hip but it hasn’t made me less human. What makes us
human is not the body but what is inside us.” Jennifer Doudna,
Professor of Chemistry and of Molecular and Cell Biology at the
University of California, Berkeley, in the United States, added: “I
am a scientist and I feel that what makes us human comes from
our brain chemistry. We are not about our physical bodies but
what is going on in our brains.”
Panellists agreed that, confronted by the rapid technological
advances of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, “our goal should
not be just to stay human but to stay humane and become more
humane,” Greely proposed. “Staying curious, compassionate
and gentle is fine, so let’s hang on to that,” reckoned Angela
Hobbs, Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the
University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom. “
“The question of what makes us interesting is interesting but it is
not relevant,” Yahyaoui suggested. “We are at a crossroads and
have to think about that. We should not stay human; we should
become be \