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OpinionComment
Patrik K. Meyer
Patrik K. Meyer

Opinion | Once AI can do everything for us, what do we do?

  • If the survival instinct becomes obsolete, it must be replaced by a new source of motivation, before we slide into physical and mental atrophy
  • To find our own life purposes, we need to rethink the education system and to partially ‘dedigitalise’ our lives

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Tourists on a beach in Kuta, Bali, Indonesia, on May 22. We will need the psychological ability to construct our own strong motivations to remain active and creative, not for the purpose of surviving, but for the sake of experiencing, learning and growing. Photo: EPA-EFE
Patrik K. Meyer

The genetically programmed survival instinct is a core driving force behind human industry and creativity. Achieving food security, providing a comfortable and safe living environment, acquiring new skills and developing ways to facilitate and extend lives have been dominant human objectives for centuries.

Even when it comes to obtaining an education, the main goal is to acquire knowledge and expertise to ensure a safe, stable and long life for us, our families and communities. For millennia, survival had not been viable without humans making significant physical and mental contributions. Now, it is.

Physical work is being absorbed by autonomous robots, and cognitive activities in every imaginable field – engineering, design, research, medicine, art, sciences, entertainment, education, economics, art, spirituality, technology – are being outsourced to applications driven by artificial intelligence (AI).
Self-driving cars, healthcare management, financial planning, management of social media, designing optimised engineering structures, developing new materials and conducting sophisticated research are increasingly looking to AI. Art, literature, entertainment and numerous other fields will be dominated by AI too.

Automation and AI are reaching such levels of sophistication and becoming so pervasive that they are quickly making human performance and contributions look comparatively mediocre, if not insignificant. Crucially, human contributions are becoming unnecessary. As a result, humans will be relegated to performing increasingly simple tasks.

For example, the use of GPS (the global positioning system) eliminates the need for us to have strong spatial orientation, be familiar with maps or do complex calculations to optimise a trip. We just need to be capable of following a few extremely simple verbal or graphic indicators: go straight, left or right. That suffices. And with the introduction of autonomous vehicles, not even basic knowledge or skills will be needed to go from one place to the other.

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