We have changed. Where once the reaction to new technology was excitement and creativity, now it is fear. And that fear is well-earned. Mobile phones have stolen our attention, and social media has polarised our societies. We are, these days at least, as aware of the downsides of a technology as of its potential benefits.

In particular, the world of AI seems to have polarised, between the boosters and the boomers, yet history teaches us that neither will be right. AI will not be an inevitable unalloyed good, but neither will it be a failure nor a disaster.

And, threaded through the talks of NEXT25 was a hint of the narrow path that walks between those camps, and points to a more productive future. The increasing mechanisation of the industrial age freed up humanity to concentrate on developing the information age. But if we can see AI as the mechanising of information work, what does that free up humanity to do next? Could this be the start of the creativity age?

The end of the digital era

The second NEXT I attended – in 2012 in Berlin – had the tagline “Post-digital”. 13 years on, that vision is completely realised because digital technology is no longer interesting. It’s boring, mundane. We’re all used to it. The excitement, the buzz, the terror, is all around AI, and while it’s a technology built of digital, it’s not digital as we know it: it’s a generative technology, crafting new things from probability patterns extracted from old things.

This is the end of the digital age and the beginning of the AI age.

And so, what becomes of us humans in this new age? We already see some of the impacts around us, with layoffs, and shifting job roles. Some of those will, inevitably, revert — we’re right at the peak of inflated expectations for AI (to use the Gartner hype cycle’s wording), and some form of crash is coming.

You can see the signs of it, for example, in some game companies, as an AI mandate hits productivity rather than boosting it. We’re still in the position of pushing early-stage technology without a clear understanding of the trade-off involved. Research suggests that AI can slow experienced developers working on familiar codebases, for example.

Humanity in the AI age

However, these are the teething stages – we will figure out where we can successfully use AI and where we can’t. And then? As we used to say about digital, everything that can be done by AI, will be done by AI. But it’s clear that some of the things we’re trying to apply AI to now won’t end up working. And in there, we start to see the threads of the role of the human in the AI era.

In an interesting echo of something we discussed in the post-pandemic era of flexible working, NEXT25 brought home that one of the things that human beings do best is collaborate – work together. Could human collaboration make for better inputs into AI systems, facilitating better outputs? That, at least, was the idea being explored by the session named (misleadingly) the end of creativity. John Michael Schert and Brett Perry explored the power of collaboration and vulnerability to create new things, a theme that was very much picked up in an afternoon workshop.

If, as people discussed, the process is now handled by AI, we need to focus on ensuring we provide the right inputs to the system. And that requires creating space for what humans do best: collaborate. The ideas that arise when humans with different viewpoints and experiences debate and discuss are something quite different from what AI does; through its very probabilistic nature, it will tend towards the average and the expected. Not so, groups of humans working together.

Humanity as the shepherds of AI

That sense of real-time collaboration was emphasised by the fact that Schert reworked his session in light of David Mattin’s keynote just a few hours earlier. Mattin not only refused to ignore the elephant in the room, he spent his time actually making us look at it. What is our role in this AI future? Do we just become like manual workers tending the machines during the Industrial Revolution? Are we just there to weed out errors and hallucinations, while the machines do most of the work?

Certainly, there will be a role for us in that. We are, right now, too trusting of AI, and our reasons for distrust should go beyond worrying about hallucinations. As Nina Jankowicz explained, AI can be corrupted and poisoned, and turned into a vector for misinformation. At least one solution she explored was that of content provenance: both in terms of organisation, but also in terms of humans. In an era of exponential growth in content, the source of that content is going to matter ever more. And that’s about trust — something we have to earn.

In effect, we have to relearn the trust patterns of the past three decades. We’re used to computers being deterministic machines — doing exactly what we ask. Now they’re becoming generative, probabilistic machines, our trust cannot lie with them, but in those we trust to use them, and work with their output to create what we want. Our machines are no longer as trustworthy as they once were…

Rebuilding the human/machine relationship

Here’s another ending: we are reaching the end of trying to make humans behave like machines. And now, we’re assuming that we’ve made machines that behave like humans. But neither is strictly true. Human and machine “brains” work in different ways. And in that distinction lies the biggest clue to the future.

Human brains do connect with one another, not through cables or Wi-Fi, but through synchronised brainwave states. And, as Hannah Critchlow explored, there’s an argument that humanity is evolving towards a kind of collective super-brain, facilitated by our ability to enter these states of creative collaboration through the way our brains function. As wholly different forms of “intelligences”, AIs can support this process, but never participate in it as an equal partner.

And it’s in this ability to connect and collaborate that humanity’s true power kicks in. We give to the AI what it’s good at – and create space to better explore what we can bring. We saw little hints of this in the intriguing session on the future of the website. The idea of a dual-layer web, with one layer designed for the machines and the other for humanity, gives a sense of how we might start to reorganise ourselves around this emergent technology.

Refocusing and accelerating our human creativity

As Mattin said, our apex need is to be seen, recognised and empathised with by other human beings. AI can create dangerously seductive facsimiles of that, but never the real experience. His argument was that, just as the industrial revolution freed us from backbreaking manual labour, the AI revolution will free us from repetitive cognitive labour. And free us up to concentrate on being human.

But what it means to be human in that context is complicated. For example, robots can neatly slide into some caring roles we once associated with humans. But even there, we’re looking at a situation where the robots do the mundane, scheduled tasks, and humans deal with the emotional, unpredictable messiness of a human being in need of care.

AI is growing so fast that it, in and of itself, is unlikely to be a competitive advantage. We have multiple vendors moving at roughly similar paces, with open-source models chasing behind them. Using AI, if it’s an advantage now, won’t stay one for long. Unlike the advent of digital, we’re rushing into the adoption of this technology, so early adopters are likely to have only a few months’ lead if they’re lucky.

So, instead, the competitive advantage will fall to those who are best able to redeploy their human talent, to create that cognitive superbrain among its employees, to surprise and delight its customers with new things, while AI handle the mundane, the predictable, the trainable. Perhaps, if we do this right, AI won’t be the end of creativity, but the beginning of a new age of it.