I had the honor of being invited to participate in Horasis’ extraordinary meeting on the United States of America in March. The topics were wide ranging — and ours was simply “can digital technologies make us better humans?”

Our panel endeavored to answer the question. We were:

• Trista Bridges, Principal and Co-founder, Read the Air, helps companies build sustainability into their business, Japan
• Scott Francis, Chief Executive Officer, BP3, USA
• Matt Spence, Former US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, USA
• Karthik Suri, Chief Digital Officer, Invitae, genetics to mainstream medicine, USA
• Chaired by Dave Hanley, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Tomorrow, USA

Can Digital Technologies Make Us Better Human Beings?

Well this was the quite interesting question. I really liked Trista’s take — combining digital technologies with the idea of a more sustainable outcome for all of us — interpreting a “better human being” as one that does less harm to the environment, or as a goal, is a net benefit to the environment.

Karthik of Invitae also had a great response — with a belief in the power to use technology to democratize and make available to everyone: educational materials, capabilities, creative tools, music, the gig economy, etc.

Matt Spence talked about how we initially thought our tools for communication were being used for good — mobilizing charity, voters, and communities. But we soon learned that these social media tools are also virtual panopticons, allowing authoritative governments or harassers to observe your behavior wherever you are, and to more accurately identify you. It is a real challenge for our future.

Collectively we talked about bias — technology’s ability to help us eliminate bias, as well as examples where it just doesn’t do enough, or where eliminating bias isn’t enough to make a difference.

For my own part, you can see what I had to say here:

But I’ll summarize a few points as well:

First, there’s a great deal of fear of automation. And I would start by saying that that fear — as an individual — is not unreasonable. Any of us could have our work, our job, our career — impacted by technology, or by digital technologies. However, in aggregate, the more automation we have introduced, the more jobs we have created — this has held true for a very long arc of history. And yet, past results are no guarantee of future performance, as we all know. So what are signs that digital technologies and automation might lead to better humans?

Well, first there’s the classic example of the roofing robot vs. the Roofer. The economic case for building a specialized robot that can do roofing is a tricky bet. There are, after all, many kinds of roofs, many materials, many specifications. A nail gun, on the other hand, is an easy economic case- make that human roofer much more productive. I should credit Francis Carden for that example, from a talk he gave at Driven in 2019.

We could also imagine the number of postal carrier jobs that have been displaced by sending emails instead of snail mail. But that isn’t really how it works — by automating the sending of messages, we allowed for vastly more and richer communications to happen without requiring additional human labor to pass the messages.

Another interesting example is Amazon. Roughly ten years ago they bought warehouse robotics company Kiva — for something like $750M. And yet, here we are, and they finished 2020 with approximately 1.2 million employees. In this context, it is hard to argue that automation cost jobs at Amazon. A more nuanced argument would be that perhaps Amazon eliminated jobs in other businesses — and that may be true. But in aggregate, there are more people working the USA (pre-Covid) than at any previous time in history, and I expect we will return to that level of employment very soon in 2021.

Finally, a third example where Automation has made us better humans- is with the COVID vaccine response. The intense automation of the sequencing of genomes resulted in the genome being sequenced within days, and a vaccine being designed within days. And then after 9–10 months of clinical trials and tests, we have emergency use authorizations of 3 vaccines in the USA, and other vaccines approved for use elsewhere.

In aggregate, automation and digital technologies can make us better humans. But whether these things do — or not — is really up to us — the humans.

Here is the panel in its entirety: