As the world surges into the Fourth Industrial Revolution – a new age of interactive technologies, artificial intelligence and automation – a key challenge for individuals will be to understand and retain their very essence, their humanity, leading scientists and thought leaders on society and law said in the closing panel session of the recent World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2016. Being able to master the technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution must be an essential part of that, the panellists agreed.
As pointed out by Henry T Greely, the Deane F and Kate Edelman Johnson professor of law at Stanford University, US, all of us need to begin to understand and grapple with how we want to shape these technologies. “We are competing with artificial intelligence,” asserted meeting co-chair Amira Yahyaoui, founder and chair of citizens action group Al Bawsala in Tunisia and a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Shaper community of leaders in their twenties.
We really have to show we are the good ones. So the discussion of ethics and value has never been more essential than it is today. We should not think of robots as competitors. To quote Justine Cassell, associate dean, at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University,  we should consider them as collaborators to help us do what we wish to do but cannot do alone and help us to be part of a larger community.
Robots and artificial intelligence will force people to hone human skills that were much more important generations ago in the days of very low tech. “Empathy, respect – those skills will be effective for the workplace of the future,” Cassell reckoned. “It is through comparison with robots that we will know what it is to be human.”
As rightfully declared by Jennifer Doudna, professor of chemistry and of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley,  what makes us human comes from our brain chemistry. We are not about our physical bodies but what is going on in our brains.
As the panellists agreed, confronted by the rapid technological advances of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, “our goal should not be just to stay human but to stay humane and become more humane.” The need of the hour is to become better humans.
To quote Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum: “If we all create self-awareness and, in our own personal and collective lives, work towards improving the state of the world, we would live out our human dimension.”
It goes without saying that there needs to be a concerted global effort to eradicate poverty, illiteracy, lack of sanitation, improve access to technology and healthcare, and put an end to the refugee crisis, irrespective of the geographical distribution of the human population.

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