Putting the Humanity back into Technology

(This article originally appeared in Ambition, AMBA’s thought leadership publication – in print and online – and has been republished on this website with the permission of AMBA.)

Our future success as individuals will hinge on our ability to be able to use technology to help make whatever we do better, says Dave Coplin.

For the last three decades I have been working with the world’s largest technology companies helping people to truly understand the amazing potential on offer when humans work in harmony with the machines.

I have written two books, I’ve worked with businesses and governments all over the world and recently I’ve been inspiring and engaging kids and adults alike, all with one single goal in mind, which is simply to help everyone get the absolute best from technology.

After thirty years of working at the bleeding edge, I know that the only really important thing about all of our futures, is not the technology itself nor how it will develop but instead is simply about how we as humans can evolve and adapt to make the most of the incredible potential it offers us every single day.

In an age where algorithms answer our questions and robots do much of our ‘heavy lifting’, what we really need is a way of combining the best of technological capability with the best of human ability, finding that sweet spot where humans and machines complement each other. With that in mind, here are my top ten skills that will enable humans to rise, to achieve more than ever before not just at work but across all aspects of our lives:

When it comes to creativity, I absolutely believe that technology is one of the most creative forces that we will ever get to enjoy. But creativity needs to be discovered and it needs to be nurtured. Our future will be filled with complex, challenging problems, the like of which we will never have encountered before. We’re going to need a society of creative thinkers to help navigate it.

While the machines are busy crunching numbers, it will be the humans who will be left to navigate the complicated world of emotions, motives and intentions. In a world of the dark, cold logic of algorithms, the ability for individuals to understand and share the feelings of others is going to become a crucial skill. Along with creativity, empathy will be one of the most critical attributes that defines the border between human and machine.

As well as teaching ourselves and our families to be confident with technology we also need to be accountable for how we use it.

Just because the computer gives you an answer, it doesn’t make it right. We all need to learn to take the computer’s valuable input but crucially combine that with our own human intuition in order to discover the best course of action. Our future is all about being greater than the sum of our parts…

One of creativity’s most important companions is curiosity – it is the gateway to the best way to be creative with technology. We walk around with a device in our pockets that has access to every bit of knowledge, every opinion our society has collected over the past couple of millennia and it’s right there at our fingertips. But how often do we think of it in those terms? And what do we choose to do with all that knowledge? Two words, “cat videos”. I’m being playful of course, but part of the solution is to help all of us, especially kids, be curious about the world around us and to use technology to explore it.

Critical thinking will be the 21st century human’s superpower. If we can help individuals both understand and apply it, we can, over time, unleash the full potential of our connected world. With every single piece of content we consume, from whatever source and on whatever topic, we need to be asking ourselves as to whether we should believe the content to be true rather than simply assuming it is.

One of digital technology’s key purposes is to connect humans with each other. Communicating with others is as essential to our future survival as breathing and yet we’re often just not that good at it, especially when we’re communicating with others who aren’t in the same physical space.

Learning to communicate well (and that includes really effective listening) regardless of whether that is on-line or off-line is one of the basic literacies of our digital world.

Building on our communication skills, collaboration is the purpose for much of the reason behind why we need to communicate well. Technology enables large numbers of people to come together, aligned around a common cause but we can only harness the collective power of people if we can find the best way to work together to unleash our collective potential.

The future doesn’t stand still and now more than ever, that means neither can we. While we used to think about education as a single phase, early on in most people’s lives, the reality is that learning needs to be an everyday occurrence, regardless of our age or stage of life. Thanks to new technologies like artificial intelligence, skills that are new today will be automated tomorrow and this means we can never afford to stand still.

The by-product of a rapidly changing world is that we need to help people learn to embrace the ambiguity such a world presents. More traditional mindsets of single domains of skills and single careers will have to give way to the much more nebulous world of multiple skillsets for multiple careers. In order to make the transition, people are going to need to find a way to preserve and develop enough energy to be able to embrace every new change and challenge so that they can both offer value and be valued by the ever changing society they are a part of.