Humaneering: An Extended Manifesto for a More Humanly Creative Future

This is a manifesto of hope in the face of change for a more human future thanks to collective creativity.

0. Observed Risks

Without any intention of drawing up a complete list of the main risks posed by the evolution of access to information in a digital era dominated by an increasingly personalized Internet and the proliferation of access to generative AI

1. We do not believe in the singularity

The singularity is understood as the moment beyond which we are unable to imagine how a change –technological or not– alters our ability to understand the future after that milestone.

Any human who prides themselves on being up to date on digitalization and technological change has to add the concept of singularity to their jargon. It is as if dystopian TV series and the singularity had been the frames of conversation around digital transformation. And the singularity is nothing more than a cognitive limitation.

Is it possible that the human inability to see beyond is a cognitive block that can be resolved generatively through interaction with other humans in a creative environment?

Human beings carry hundreds of cognitive biases, and our ability to discern is limited by a brain that rewards our individual survival and our purpose.

We have been able to send human beings off our planet and to synthesize genetic code, yet we still fight over a piece of land in absurd wars. Human beings are the worst enemy of their own sustainability.

Should we perhaps group individual purposes together beyond individual greed and arrogance? There is enough for everyone on Mother Earth and perhaps not so much left for the obsessive-compulsive disorder of growing at any cost.

"Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's needs, but not every man's greed". –Mahatma Gandhi

“All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward."— Ellen Glasgow.

2. We believe in human adaptability through creative collaboration and conversation among diverse people.

What makes us unique is our ability to share knowledge through conversations. That has been humanity's key to overcoming the most complex problems.

Creativity is the human capacity that sets us apart from many of the living beings that share this planet with us.

We have been able to create tools, and with those tools we have placed ourselves at the top of the food chain. Perhaps it is now our turn to redefine our role from super-predators to super-creative beings if we want to preserve our planet and look after our fellow humans in the future. We are all capable of innovating. And we can all do it sustainably.

Human beings may have lost their capacity to be creative because of an excessive focus on surviving and on specialization. That seems to be what the industrial, technological and knowledge revolutions of the past two-odd centuries rewarded.

And now, since the invention of the Internet, a hopeful glimmer of access to knowledge seemed to be in sight. Our magical ability to reinvent ourselves (innovation and the creation of new tools) has once again become our problem.

Algorithmic solutions have been able to generate an almost unlimited space of access to information, but one that is increasingly biased in terms of knowledge.

We only see, hear and read what perpetuates our time spent on digital assets. From the dreamed-of access to information, we have fallen into the trap of biased knowledge bubbles (we only ever access content automated by our preferences).

Since we live in the era of specialization and in the era of filter bubbles (echo chambers), is it possible to reformulate our own tools once again in order to creatively design a better future?

Perhaps we have buried our creativity in a hole of polarization catalyzed by algorithms, infinite scrolls and video carousels that dull our capacity to act while they anesthetize our attention.

"A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa." –Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook

3. To do that, we need to reactivate our creative capacity by cultivating curiosity collaboratively.

Quoting Nathan Myhrvold: “The world rewards specialization. But specialization comes at cost. You learn more and more about less and less, until you know everything about nothing.”

We create problems we are not able to solve because we try the same solution over and over again expecting different results. Einstein called that insanity. And staying with the master, if the same mind that creates a problem is not able to find the solution, why not add new minds to the equation?

How can we solve the complex problems we face (e.g. sustainability and economic growth, pandemic isolation without blocking supply chains and halting international trade) and at the same time design and implement simple solutions collaboratively?

If we let AI solve the challenge of the planet's sustainability, the first decision it makes will probably be to eradicate humans from the planet. Something similar would happen with an algorithmic model meant to prevent pandemics. And it may not be far off the mark, given the way we humans have taken it upon ourselves to behave so far.

“The world rewards specialization. But specialization comes at cost. You learn more and more about less and less, until you know everything about nothing."–Nathan Myhrvold

4. The solution lies in language, in diversity and in creative conversations beyond our peers (diversity).

5. We humans are generative beings through language.

Throughout history we have created our reality by transcending belief systems. Until the early Renaissance, the Earth was the center of the universe. And there were humans who almost paid with their lives for trying to open a debate in the opposite direction.

We already know that a single sentence changes the course of history. Can we not catalyze the generation of these sentences to reinvent the course of history and so avoid falling into the trap of the singularity?

Perhaps it falls to us to work this exercise out through multidisciplinary conversations among diverse people. Language, conversations, creativity and the management of diversity become the simplest solution to our problem of future uncertainty.

If our language defines who we are, can we not create new formulations creatively and collaboratively by adding new points of view? By adding new human beings with different belief systems and with different behavior-limiting patterns imposed by their surroundings, and taking that to infinity, would we not minimize the dilemma of “the same mind that creates a problem is not able to solve it”?

We have talked about information, about knowledge. And perhaps the challenge of wisdom is hidden in an amalgam of different human beings. There are mathematical proofs (Scott E. Page and his “diversity prediction theorem”) showing that individual error is cancelled out when you add multiple humans and increase their diversity, thereby improving their predictive capacity.

Instead of predicting the future, let us create that future through collaborative exercises among diverse people. Our future has been conditioned by our innovative capacity in creating tools that open up new dystopian drifts of the future.

"The future is not something we enter. The future is something we create." –Leonard I. Sweet

6. Humans with a diversity of knowledge and educational and cultural backgrounds. Environments for reflection and spaces set aside for creative conversation and debate.

Instead of spending our time unproductively consuming dystopian TV series that condition our collective creativity, let us dream, talk and get down to work to design a better future. A more human future.

For that we need to push for more and more spaces of divergent thinking, to go beyond the design of possible futures while avoiding the singularity deadlock, blindness through homogeneity or the cognitive biases amplified by filter bubbles.

In a change of era, it is time to commit to setting aside time for reflection, diverse spaces for multidisciplinary conversation and creative conversations among human beings who are curious and hopeful about creating a more human future.

7. We believe in the possibility of generating a more human future.

This post is dedicated to the students of the 11th cohort (iePDTD11) of the executive program in Digital Transformation at IE Business School Executive Education:

I include in the dedication Alejandro Virchez and