The Human Initiative - Transform and Fulfill your Purpose!

With the latest developments in artificial intelligence, it's become apparent that there is a widening gap between current thinking and that which is needed to succeed in our future. Thinking must begin with recognizing our innate value as humans, specifically as individuals, to intentionally pursue our unique personal development. Here we will delve into the intricacies of this gap, to reconcile our sense of self and the challenge to our identities, with the technical displacement we must face, and the opportunity for our individual adaptation.

Philosophy contends with our perception of self and our ultimate reality. The technologies of our day are not the beginning of our challenges. At the dawn of the industrial age, agriculture was a dominant global industry that was disrupted by a nexus of environmental challenges and economic stressors. These led individuals to flee rural communities and agricultural roles, and flock towards urban centers and manufacturing roles. In these places they found work to sustain their families and to build mechanical things. This cycle carried through to further industrialization and the development of new technologies like the steam engine and telecommunications, further disrupting economics, the working culture, further separating the individual from the pre-industrial agricultural era.

We find ourselves in another such cycle. Living and working in the service age, our processes, and approach to work, is comparable to the industrial mindset, in that we as individuals design and codify things as instructions and steps, just as done for industrial methods. Our orientation of self to the scaffolding of rules and techniques is now faced with a translation challenge for all of us to contend with.

It’s the difference that remains when technology displaces the work we each identify with – that we are no longer what we do. It is a multi-faceted displacement and transformation resulting from intelligent technologies and machinery capable of mimicking human behavior and shape. The aim it would seem is to fill the void we find in ourselves – that we will no longer identify with what we did.

Rather we are what we aspire to be and identify with the new things we will do. This will fundamentally require intentional effort to escape the actions and knowledge we have associated with our sense of self. It is vital that we as individuals pursue greater things beyond engineered order-based roles and tasks, to those that are not bound by knowledge (which is available to all), nor dependent on the movement of material or information (now a mechanical commodity).

Greater things will require that we challenge our egos and sense of self in a way never before seen, but forever contemplated by philosophy. Therefore, it is necessary to explore facets of identity, to help us move forward in practical ways, to lead toward actions and the fulfillment of our human endeavors.