When everything is digitised, what do humans do?

I was recently asked: Where are the boundaries of digitalisation (are there any)?

We all would have different answers to this one, but there are boundaries to digitalisation. The main boundary is where technology is replacing the human, rather than augmenting humanity. I blogged about that last year:

AI should augment the human and automate the mundane

The key is to recognise that technology can digitalise and automate everything that we find boring and mundane. I could leave it there, but let’s go down this rabbit hole for a minute. Could we digitalise relationships? We already are – just look at romance scams or the film Her.

Romance cryptocurrency scams: The rise of ‘often educated, well-off people’ being defrauded out of thousands of dollars | The Independent

Could we digitise creativity? We already are:

AIVA, the AI Music Generation Assistant

Films and entertainment?

Sora | OpenAI

Art and poetry?

AI Image Generator API (hotpot.ai)

The list goes on.

So, we started thinking that technology would just digitise administration; today, it is automating the whole human world. How far can it go? Well, as GenZ would say, to the moon!

I guess that the real question therefore is not: Where are the boundaries of digitalisation; but more the question that I struggle with every day, which is: When everything is digitised, what do humans do?

This is a really difficult question as you won’t need a lot of the things that humans do today. You won’t need taxi and lorry drivers or baristas or even chefs; you won’t need accountants, assistants or even executives; you won’t need actors, creators or even thinkers … it’s all done for you. So, what will humans do?

Well, I’ve already talked about this, in terms of trainers, maintainers and explainers, but let’s take this to the moon and back. Humans provide all of the direction of digitalisation. Without our inputs, machines would have no outputs. This means that humans need to continue to nurture their empathy, compassion, relationships and yes, creativity, as these are the things that will always be valued in the future. After all, you can train a machine to love but you cannot train a machine to be loved.