Yet Colossus only beat us at one task; according to Bengio, “superhuman” AI will beat us at a “vast array of tasks.” But that assumes being human is to be nothing more than a particularly versatile task-completion machine. Once you accept that devastating reduction of the scope of our humanity, the production of an equivalently versatile task-machine with “superhuman” task performance doesn’t seem so far-fetched; the notion is almost mundane.

We use and understand the term superhuman to mean something very much like us, but better. The fictional Superman is perhaps the best-known English-language articulation of the superhuman idea. Superman is not Earth-born, but he embodies and far exceeds our highest human ideals of physical, intellectual and moral strength. He isn’t superhuman just because he flies; a rocket does that. He isn’t superhuman because he can move heavy things; for this, a forklift will do. Nor is he superhuman because he excels at a “vast array” of such tasks. Instead, he is an aspirational magnification of what we see as most truly human.

The struggle against this reductive and cynical ideology has been hard-fought for a few hundred years thanks to vigorous resistance from labor and human rights movements that have articulated and defended humane, nonmechanical, noneconomic standards for the treatment and valuation of human beings — standards like dignity, justice, autonomy and respect.

Important note for an AI Impact Officer

Let’s start with education. In many countries, the former ideal of a humane process of moral and intellectual formation has been reduced to optimized routines of training young people to mindlessly generate expected test-answer tokens from test-question prompts. Generative AI tools — some of which advertise themselves as “your child’s superhuman tutor” — promise to optimize even a kindergartener’s learning curve. Yet in the U.S., probably the world’s tech-savviest nation, young people’s love of reading is at its lowest levels in decades, while parents’ confidence in education systems is at a historic nadir.  What would reclaiming and reviving the humane experience of learning look like? What kind of world might our children build for themselves and future generations if we let them love to learn again, if we taught them how to rediscover and embrace their humane potential? How would that world compare to one built by children who only know how to be an underperforming machine?

future education