What is coming?

It is difficult to hold back and watch those you love make mistakes on the learning journey. Nevertheless, it is what we must do. It is part of the learning and living journey. Sometimes, mistakes are required to make learning stick by presenting alternative choices, other times, mistakes throw open a new vista of opportunities.

In our connected world, mistakes are getting more unforgivable, making the job of parents and leaders more crucial. 

You can classify mistakes using any smart adjectives - genuine mistake, honest mistake, stupid mistake, careless mistake, beautiful mistake, lucky mistake, malicious mistake, mindless mistake, serendipitous mistake; but a mistake is a mis-take, you would have preferred to avoid it and your input never intended the consequences.

The development of Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) will not make human learning easier, as machine learning increasingly makes human learning seem too slow and ineffective. Capitalism has always exterminated the slow and ineffective, it will remain true to character with humans.

Unfortunately, we cannot take mistakes out of human learning, but we can give better direction.

The slight differences between people are now compounded at a much higher rate than in previous times. People start mistaking mistakes for failure, making them feel like failures at much younger ages, leading to an astronomical rise in depression, drug abuse and suicides. 

To avert this feeling, humankind is being habituated to do less and expect more. An oxymoron that promotes extinction.

It seems as machine learning accelerates the ease of living and the associated reduced need for human exertion, humanity has become more dissatisfied and impatient. This is why I pay attention to the singularity crowd, not because of the obvious narrative on ASI and the ways in which civilization will metamorphose, but because I feel the need to understand how humankind will manage the coming state - a state of “be” without “being”.

I expect an inadvertent increase in demand for psychologists and psychiatrists within organizations and in the larger society. These are currently undervalued fields in Nigeria, so an opportunity exists for those trying to pick up a course of study and are not yet into the coding buzz.

For those paying attention, we must give better direction and cover to those in our care.

- Osasu Oviawe