As technology grows in the world, humans are being restored to being human.
Doing, Knowing, and Being
The Doing Economy is rapidly being replaced by robotics and machines. The Knowing Economy is transitioning to artificial intelligence and neural SaaS network systems where you pay for something in the cloud that does something for you.
Traditional knowing jobs such as accounting, financial services, diagnostic and some surgical medicine, data, repetitive legal processes, and certain therapies will be rapidly replaced by smart AI machines. While many people have been fighting the disruption of the Knowing Economy by the emerging Being Economy, I am excited by the shift to human experiences, creativity, and leadership capabilities.
In the Industrial era, humans were turned into machines. Taylorism, or the scientific management of workflows, labour productivity, and efficiency, gave way to eliminating waste, Deming, the Toyota Production Method, lean manufacturing, Six Sigma, and the apex of man as machine, then man building new machines to do our own jobs. The emphasis on STEM education over the past decade is fuelling this new economy.
The Being Economy
Now, as technology is releasing the people of the industrialised nations from being machines, the human race can learn to be human again. This is the Being Economy.
Think about the smart phone. Human beings have become augmented by technology as apps have replaced so many gadgets we bought in the past to give us information, and help us do things. We also have augmented minds. In the coming economic revolution, human intuition will be augmented by AI.
AI and neural networks can do repetitive tasks better than humans. What AI cannot learn right now, is higher level pattern recognition. Humans can see patterns dealing with human behaviour, hierarchies, and relationship-related activities at the core of being human.
As human beings are leaving the era of being human machines, and evolving and outgrowing who we are, we are learning we have not been trained to be human. We sense that we lack value and purpose.
In my human work in both domains (business and community leadership), people often reflect upon life saying, “there has to be more.” Well, there is, if you commit to follow that rabbit hole all the way to where it leads. That takes courage and will require you to learn the capabilities necessary to become who you truly are.
People have a desire to outgrow the expectations that family and society place on them in terms of who they were “supposed to be.” When people work as machines doing work to make money to just survive, they are in terms of human potential, living at the lowest level of being truly human, according to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
The longing to be human is expressed when we want to feel, create, and have passion for who we are in life. There has been so much value placed on knowing in the modern and postmodern worlds. Young people strapped with student debt in America have paid to know, without knowing who and what they were going to be. Then, coming out of school equipped with knowledge in a certain topic, they enter human work networks and have no desire to be part of the machine. They discover the work environment sucks, and they don’t even want to be there. There must be more. They are right. There is more.
The gap today is learning how to be human after being machines in the Industrial Age.
Human Again
In my domain of doing business, I have observed no one teaches young people how to present themselves, how to show up, and how to elevate their value as a human. For three years between 2012-2014, I taught undergraduate university students business one night per week. My three classes were operations management, corporate finance, and investment management. My popularity as a professor was my sharing real world applied business experiences as a leader.
The hunger from very bright students in academia was for mentoring in how to live. There is so much opportunity today for those who have developed an inner life of thinking, relating, and being to mentor other people struggling to know how to be human.
Connecting humans with other humans who have been physically separated from one another by so called social media is a new emerging market. Some restaurants are adding social activities and classes in adjacent facilities due to the isolation and loneliness of their clientele. The digital world is creating a need in the real world for social connection that used to come from weekly attendance at houses of worship, learning at brick and mortar universities instead of online, and shopping at physical stores instead of Amazon.
We as augmented human beings are outgrowing who we are. My passion and purpose in life is working with people, and bodies of people (corporations) to individually and collectively become all we are capable of becoming. My work, called The Peak of Potential, is working with people in groups to learn the personal and professional capabilities to be everything they are capable of. Individuals and companies, both, sense a lack of purpose and value in what they do. So they seek to evolve beyond the self they were told they were supposed to be.
Well meaning parents, educators, companies and organisations have turned people into machines, instead of the unique human beings they truly are. Since I have moved country, and now work in an executive role by day, I am building a body of books, blogs, and videos to promote my quarterly one-day events to bring people together for a learning and coaching experience in a group of like-minded seekers.
The first step for you to be human, is to go back to what you loved most as a child when you were human. Enthusiasm for your future is an adventure of being. The key skill in the new Being Economy is returning to the freedom of humans learning to be human. It is not just knowing and doing anymore. It is freedom to be the Super Being you are. Being yourself is the key to your life satisfaction and economic success.