As AI continues to take over the information marketplace, humans have a new opportunity to capitalize on what humans do best – create.
Humans are ingenious creatures. It’s our survival adaptation. We don’t have fur or claws. We don’t run very fast. The way Homo sapiens have always survived is through ingenuity. We’re creative. We’re problem solvers. We’re capable of thinking outside the box.
This is the way we’ve always adapted. This is the way we’ve always survived. And this is the way we’ll continue to adapt and survive.
The future of human contribution is… Intellectual Property (IP).
And not just in the sense of art or abstract creation. What I mean, in a broader sense, is human problem-solving. Solutions to problems that can only come from a human mind.
Creative solutions.
The days of humans making a living by producing information and goods are coming to an end. And whether we like it or not, we must adapt. We must survive.
In this new world where we’re competing with AI capable of producing information instantaneously and robots becoming increasingly capable, we must be creative. We have to put that most human of talents back to work.
We must rediscover our ingenuity.
We’ve all been herded into cubicles over the last 80 years. We’ve been turned into information-producing robots or production-line robots. And this was our path to the middle-class dream. It was fine for our parents and grandparents. It afforded them comfortable lives. But now AI and robots are taking over those kinds of jobs. So what are we, the humans, to do?
Before the information age, humans survived on their creativity. They built things. They grew things. And they figured things out.
My grandfather, born in 1900, was known for being able to do pretty much anything. Despite having only one leg and one eye, there was nothing he couldn’t build or fix. He was ingenious. He was creative. He could adapt to almost anything.
He could survive.
And that’s what we must do, again. We’re going to have to return to being the humans we were designed to be. No longer chained to our desks, churning out report after report. No longer fixtures on the production-line floor, screwing in bolt after bolt.
The production and consumption experiment of the last 80 years is coming to an end. We’ve produced and consumed everything there is to produce and consume. We’ve built an economy around producing more and consuming more. But what happens when that economy no longer needs humans to produce? Or consume?
We see the world moving toward automated production and an entirely different kind of consumption. Consumption of data and energy and electronic resources. And if humans are no longer needed to produce products for human consumption, what is left for us?
Intellectual property. Things born of our ingenuity, our experiences, and the problems we see and set out to solve.
We were taken from the fields and workshops and moved into the factories and offices. But the time has come for us to reverse that course. It’s time to return to our fields and our workshops. It’s time to stop simply being the minions of production and consumption. It’s time to return to being the creative creatures that we are – and were always meant to be.
As production moves further away from serving human needs, we must create our own human-level economies.
Economies based on creativity.
This is the new production and consumption…
on a human level.
