The Adaptation Advantage

8Rise of the Humans: Developing Your Creativity, Empathy, and Other Uniquely Human Capabilities

Key Ideas

1. We need to value our own intelligence—the uniquely human ways we learn, adapt, and create new value that we call organic cognition—over artificial intelligence—what we call silicon cognition.
2. As technology advances and consumes more routine work, the value of work requiring organic cognition increases. If we focus on developing uniquely human skills, we'll continue to build value for ourselves and the organizations that engage us.
3. To maximize human potential, we need to put humans at the center of every value proposition, augmenting human capacity with ever more capable tools and staying mindful of those most vulnerable to technological unemployment.

Play Is the Way Forward

The future of work is often presented as a binary choice: a hunger game between organic and silicon cognition that results in either a dystopian nightmare in which humans fight for the last jobs not taken by robots or an nearly inconceivable utopia where artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, yet we bask in the leisure and self-expression afforded our newfound time free from work. Autodesk fellow Mickey McManus describes this choice as the “Ray-Pray-Play” model that perfectly captures our perspective (Figure 8.1).

Figure 8.1 Mickey McManus's Ray-Pray-Play

Concept credit: Mickey ...