The Age of Homo Digitalis

How can we still find peace in the age of digital acceleration? Digital entrepreneur Albers recommends actively training our “analog muscles,” perhaps by exploring parts of a city with friends without any digital distractions for a day; by feeding our imagination with art, literature and music; by setting aside our cell phones (or our data glasses or similar gadgets in the future) and cooking for our families; by tolerating the rare periods of boredom that arise from dreaming and reflecting.

Training ourselves to continue doing these things will become increasingly important as digital progress continues to accelerate. The changes around us will happen faster and faster because the algorithms prompting these changes are getting better and better.

says British science teacher Mark Stevenson. “We still think in a linear way whereas technological development happens at an exponential rate.”

While we are still mesmerized by the near future and seek to understand the full range that technological innovations offer, the distant future is already overtaking us on both sides at full speed. This does not have to be a bad thing – we must simply be aware of it.

Markus Albers sells digitalization to his clients. To be more specific, the Berlin-based author and co-founder of “re-think” advises companies on how to transform an analog past to a digital future. Albers deals with people who stare at screens all day – large screens on their desks and small ones in their pockets. Yet, the 50-year-old predicts that this behavior will soon be consigned to the past. All major technology companies, from Facebook to Microsoft, are currently heavily investing in devices designed to always be on hand, most likely as voice-driven digital assistants. Despite some unsuccessful experiments like the Google Glass prototype, these gadgets are noticeably getting better.

Whether we’re shopping, working, walking through a city or driving, these devices will deliver a non-stop, high-quality stream of useful, interesting and perhaps even vital information.

There will be no need to “power up” your computer to check a work document – you will be able to view it instantly whenever you need it. Instead of checking your smartphone continuously to find your way around a city, the route will be shown to you automatically. Everything will be available in real time and the content will be tailored to each user individually.

However, these developments are affecting different levels: Family members will sit down to watch TV together and each be able to view a program that suits their own tastes on their own screen. The good news is, in the future each person can watch exactly what they like. On a less positive note, every person will see only the things they like – sooner or later, people will inevitably perceive what they see as reality. Albers warns that mixed reality could cause people “to construct an increasingly individual and isolated world that erases the need for an intersubjectively verifiable common reality.”

But more importantly, this tailor-made broadcast will never end. Albers has written an entire book on what happens when there is no way to switch off: “Digitale Erschöpfung” (or “Digital Fatigue” in English) explores the notion that the non-stop nature of our digital gadgets is visibly draining us. After all, algorithms can process data continuously at high speed, humans cannot.

Jan-Niklas Keltsch has just returned from a remarkable evening of lectures at the Cambridge Union debating society. Founded in 1815, this debate club at the University of Cambridge is considered the oldest of its kind; the venerable brick building has hosted great minds such as Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt and Stephen Hawking. Keltsch was a guest at an evening of lectures about Artificial Intelligence (AI). The opening speaker summarized the advantages and disadvantages of the technology, carefully weighed up the arguments for and against, and took the audience on a journey to a future in which machines will make more and more decisions for us.

Jan-Niklas Keltsch has studied technology management at Cambridge various years and found the lecture “utterly convincing.”

“Apart from the slightly artificial tone and the fact that the words came from an amplifier rather than a person, there was no difference than listening to a human speaker,” says Keltsch.

Eye-opening scenarios like this have become the norm for the industrial engineer and start-up entrepreneur from Hamburg. Keltsch collaborated with the auditing and consulting firm Deloitte to establish the Cognitive Services Platform, which specializes in AI applications for the business world. AI is increasingly being used even at the very core of corporate decision-making, i.e. in determining the companies’ strategy. Keltsch’s clients use AI tools to monitor markets and consumer behavior, evaluate technological trends, analyze patents, and classify posts and news – essentially all parameters that entrepreneurs use to define their strategy. And unlike human employees, AI tools work 24 hours a day, at lightning speed.

However, it’s feasible that the more we learn to trust the choices made by big data algorithms, the more likely we will lose our own ability to make decisions.

This may sound far-fetched, but we have already experienced something similar in the past two decades: Around two billion people have lost mayor parts of the ability on how to research independently during this period. Nowadays anyone looking for information will go straight to the Google website rather than initiating their own search. Without the slightest hesitation, we now leave even the most sensitive decisions about what information is trustworthy and/or relevant to our question to the algorithms programmed by Google developers. Moreover, there is no reason to believe that we would behave any different regarding other important decisions.

Will computers ever be as intelligent as humans?

“Yes, but only for a short period” is the unique response from author Vernor Vinge. And he is probably right (assuming that we leave the perfectly reasonable discussion of what “thinking” and “intelligence” really mean for another time). After all, the intelligence of computers grows with every new generation of data processor and sensor, while the supply of skills that we wrongly considered exclusive to humans inevitably shrinks.

Nevertheless, if algorithms eventually become smarter than us, what roles will be left for humans to perform? To date, we have considered ourselves the brightest, most conscious and most intellectual inhabitants of this planet. What roles can we retain when machines think faster than we do?

“In the digital world, everyone can create an artificial version of themselves on social media platforms,” says Charlie Brooker, creator of the award-winning Netflix series “Black Mirror.” The series explores our digital future, both near and distant, and its title refers to the reflective surface on our computers and cell phones. “I curate a special version of myself. When you meet people in the real world, they are very different.”

The exploding capabilities of the machines we are inventing pose a real challenge for us as a species. “If at some point everything we considered to be “thinking” is done by machines, what will there be left for us to do?” asks journalist Christoph Kucklick, who discusses visions of the future in his book “Die granulare Gesellschaft” (The Granular Society). “What island do we flee to when foreign powers occupy the continent of thought? Where do we build a new home when we are driven out of our brain?”

Kucklick concludes that in addition to new institutions for the digital age, we need a new self-image.

In contrast, Jan-Niklas Keltsch, the AI manager, is not daunted by the prospect of a future where algorithms are more intelligent than humans. Keltsch argues that machines are already better than us at many things – they can fly, calculate faster and sort materials more reliably than humans. “We accepted all of this a long time ago. We have learned to appreciate it. Why would we respond any differently when it comes to cognitive processes?”

Is it a harmless liver spot or skin cancer? Generations of dermatologists have been trained at universities to answer this question, which can be life-saving for some patients. 157 dermatologists from twelve university hospitals across Germany recently went head-to-head against a specially programmed algorithm regarding this question. In a study conducted by the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, the dermatologists analyzed 100 skin images to determine whether they were looking at a mole or a melanoma – a disease that claims 3,000 lives each year, only in Germany. The same task was assigned to the software.
The result was shockingly clear: The AI platform beat the specialists by some stretch. Just seven of the 157 dermatologists analyzed the skin images more accurately than the algorithm. Although a cancer diagnosis involves far more than deciding whether something is a mole or melanoma, it’s obvious that AI could play a tremendous role in helping us to stay healthy (or get healthier) in the future.

The chances of receiving better and more efficient treatments are enormous. However, a super-physician of this nature is subject to significant data privacy concerns and regulations. Even when data is anonymized, many people do not want information about their lifestyle, bodily functions and illnesses to leave the doctor’s office.

Yet, at least some of us may voluntarily and continuously share health information in the future. Researchers at the University of Illinois are developing pliable band-aids full of sensors that measure the electrical activity from the heart, skin moisture, body temperature and UV radiation. Just as Fitbits, these “BioStamps” may eventually be used to continuously log health-related factors and trigger an alert in the event of deviations.

Sounds like something from a science fiction film, right? Well, in Scandinavia, a quarter of the staff at tour operator TUI wear a permanent data carrier not on their skin but under their skin. The implant is permanent and voluntary. More than 110 members of staff have had a chip implanted between their thumb and forefinger, which, as one TUI employee assures us, is “no big deal.” The size of a grain of rice, the implant does not fulfill any vital tasks – it merely serves to identify the carrier. The chipped employees use it for activities such as opening the entrance door to the office, paying in the canteen or unlocking the lock on their bicycle. But what about data privacy? From this perspective, widespread acceptance is probably still years away.

Devised in the 1970s, the German notion of data privacy has survived. It was created to protect our individual characteristics, meaning that any processing activities involving personal data required prior consent. However, thanks to big data, even anonymized information can now be used to identify virtually any person very quickly and accurately. We simply accept the terms of use for every service and app we download, since reading and understanding them in full is too taxing.

We can respond to this knowledge in various ways – with fatalism (“We are all under the microscope anyway!”), isolationism (by going on a rather hopeless and lonely complete digital detox) or with pragmatism.

Michael Seemann, author of German blog “CTRL-Verlust” (CTRL loss), advocates radical digital pragmatism. “Privacy no longer exists – only encryption is left,” he suggests in his book “Das neue Spiel – Strategien für die Welt nach dem digitalen Kontrollverlust” (The New Game – Strategies for the World After the Digital Loss of Control) published in 2014. “The concept of ‘informational self-determination’ fought for with so much verve and pathos thirty years ago has been fundamentally destroyed. We’ve gradually accepted this.”

Instead of refusing to admit defeat in this battle for privacy and data control, we need to learn to be pragmatic about total transparency. Network activist Christian Heller provides a radical example of the “post-privacy” concept by documenting his daily routine, his finances and much of his most private information in a publicly accessible wiki. Heller’s motto is that he would prefer to publish his data himself before someone else gets there first.

Seemann applied a similarly antifragile model to his book: “Das neue Spiel” is available to purchase in bookstores, but Seemann covered the lion’s share of his costs via a crowdfunding campaign before writing the book and shared his text on the Internet free of charge. His model means that file sharing no longer has an impact on his work because it has already been paid for in advance.

Will digitalization put us out of work? There are plenty of signs that this could happen. Algorithms are already answering customer queries, analyzing patent specifications and writing articles like this one (although in this case it was still researched and written by a humanoid. Honest!). In the foreseeable future, algorithms will not only drive cars but also trucks, review applications and hire employees, process our tax bills as well as hand out court judgments.
The impact of relinquishing some activities to computers is matched by the influence that the intelligence revolution has on the tasks that we retain. Working with digital tools as colleagues means that the attributes we require for our working lives have changed dramatically. These new qualities can be summed up with three words: responsibility, mindfulness, collaboration.

It is self-evident that a higher level of responsibility is associated with higher-level tasks. While the average McDonald’s employee generates $60,000 a year in revenue, the average Google employee accounts a massive $1,000,000 of revenue each year. The potential damage that a careless employee can cause increases accordingly.

The need for collaboration is one of the most obvious features of our new working world. For example, more than 1,000 designers, authors, engineers and programmers have worked together for five years to create the computer game Grand Theft Auto V. As digital-agency founder Markus Albers explains, knowledge workers currently spend 85% of their working hours on collaborative activities, i.e. working through their emails, WhatsApp or Asana messages. “That is clearly too much because they lose the freedom for contemplation and concentration.”

Ironically, one of the most important skills for a Homo Digitalis to posess could be the ability to retain some of our analog attributes.