David Mattin is an internationally recognised expert on foresight, innovation, and emerging technologies and their social and economic implications. He’s been a regular keynoter at NEXT for many years.

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These are live-blogged notes from a session at NEXT25 in Hamburg. Posts will be improved over the next few days.

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We are shifting out of one economic system, one civilisational system, to another.

Why it’s the end

We are amid a convergence of new technologies, that are all coming together to push us out of our current systems into something profoundly new. The one everyone wants to talk about is AI. It’s getting scarily good. The performance software AI is the scariest exponential curve happening right now.

But it’s still slow enough that we don’t feel it happening day-by-day. We’re in a boiling frog situation. AGI is no longer sci-fi, but close to reality. And AI is being projected into the real world through robots. When your Amazon delivery comes via a robot, you’ll know something has changed.

Iconic technologist Kevin Kelly wrote a post called The Handoff to Bots about this. In advanced economies, the human population is about to peak and fall into steep decline. In the global North, it’s already happening — just as AI and humanoid robots are about to come online. We’re about to hand over the reins of our civilisations to the robots we’ve built. So – what happens next?

Things get weird

What happens to corporate jobs? When AI is doing knowledge work, we’ll see deep changes in jobs. We might see hollowing out of corporations. We’ll see more independent solo workers, sometimes running very profitable companies.

Not only that, but we’ll also see the rise of AI-to-AI transactions within AI societies and virtual worlds. We might end up with billions of AI agents in simulations. We’re heading towards a social and economic singularity. AI replaces human inputs into the economy with automated ones, replacing scarcity with abundance.

Everything we understand about the economy just breaks down. The economic system we know is dissolving.

This is the end.

What is left for humans?

Our role in the economy was to change scarcity into abundance. We turned that into the purpose, the meaning of us. Religion faded away, and we turned our jobs into our meaning. When machines can do that, what is our meaning then? This question looms over all of us in certain ways.

Are we about to be shunted aside and made irrelevant?

Yes, there will be difficulty in this transition. But it can also be an important new beginning, too, if we seize it.

You are a human being. A machine can never be a human being. If we accept that, we’ll stop being confused about some of the things we’re deeply confused about right now.

Our apex need is to be seen by another human being, to share experience and communication. Everything you deliver of value into the economy will come from the part of you that can stand in front of another human and share what it means to be human.

Why it’s the beginning

Think about a lawyer who helps you move house. That job is a lot of paperwork, which will soon be done by AI. What is left? The human element of empathising with someone moving house — a stressful process. That feels like a thin way of building an economy, but it isn’t. The thing that will become scarce is understanding other humans’ feelings. Caring and counselling are what machines can never do.

There will be so much value in bringing people together in a room, in communicating and sharing.

Creativity is going to be a powerful and important part of this future. Yes, AIs can be creative, but those outputs are commoditised. Truly different, differentiated outputs will emerge from the collision of human creativity and AI, producing something AI can’t do.

Creativity will be the true difference between humans and AI.

This new beginning is about us — about all people together. When machines can do so much of the cognitive labour, they liberate us to do the things only we can do — being a person, communing with another human being. While the machines do their work, we are free to do our work. And that’s the work that has always mattered. And it’s what we should always have been doing.

That’s the new beginning — if we seize this chance.

Seizing the AI opportunity

That’s not guaranteed. We need to:

1. Come together as a collective to establish rules and norms for technology, ensuring it remains under control and benefits us.
2. We need to share the abundance the machines create, rather than it falling into fewer hands.
3. We have to decide that humans matter. We can’t decide that if AIs can do the economic labour, there’s nothing left for humans.
   

We can’t just stare at a screen, consume content created by AIs and algorithms, we also need to look up, and share with each other.