This post is co-produced by The Futures Agency content curator Petervan
Gerd was recently invited to make ongoing contributions to Forbes’ Cognitive World, a knowledge hub, ecosystem and marketplace for dealmakers involved in AI transformation. His first post just went live – find the highlights and key quotes below.
“What we are experiencing is a shift in the very definition of what it means to be human. Before now, technological revolutions have involved the material world around us, but now that infotech and biotech are converging and technology starts going inside of us, the changes will be unlike anything humankind has ever seen before.
Generally, datafication, automation, cognification and virtualization (what Gerd calls the Megashifts) can slash costs dramatically but will also significantly increase security and safety risks (think IoT), and have huge impact on privacy and human agency, at large. Our increasingly blind trust in ‘intelligent’ technology, and our inclination towards viewing machines as superior, per se, is truly frightening. Gerd believes that we must maintain faith in those human elements that technology will and should never replace: instinct, creativity, empathy, intuition and imagination (the Androrithms).”
Read the full article here.
In summary:
- Humanity will change more in the next 20 years than the previous 300 years
- Embrace technology, but don’t become it
- Technology is not what we seek, but how we seek
- The future is ‘Hellven’ ( Heaven + Hell )
- Beware exponential abdication, de-skilling and ‘forgetting ourselves.’
Gerd often states that the future is not something to be feared – in fact, it is better than we think! But without global governance and the injection of ethics and humanity into the dialogue, there’s no knowing where the unstoppable tech revolution will take us. Gerd has proposed the creation of a Global Digital Ethics Council (GDEC) that would provide guidance to governments and businesses alike.
Societies may be driven by their technology – but will be defined by their humanity.
Download the article PDF.
Read more about the ‘Megashifts’, here.
Watch more about ‘Androrithms’, here.
