The Next Disruptive Wave: Human Augmentation
Technological disruption goes back to the first Industrial Revolution. Recent waves include mobile, social and sensors. Up next: Human Augmentation.
Technological disruption goes back to the first Industrial Revolution. Recent waves include mobile, social and sensors. Up next: Human Augmentation.
to the smell of waffles hot from her kitchPARI AWAKENS IN LONDON en’s 3D printer. Her virtual personal assistant, Martin, says good morning and mentions that it’s cold outside. He tells her that he’s purchased the sweater she’s been admiring and it has just been drone-delivered. After she gets dressed, her driverless taxi arrives. During the commute, she enjoys a virtual-reality (VR) call with her husband, who is travelling overseas.
When Pari arrives at her shared office space, she is notified that three different companies have requisitioned the services of the freelance collective to which she belongs. One request originated in China and has already been translated. On her way home after work, Pari’s implanted microchip alerts Martin to a high cholesterol reading. Martin announces that he has booked an appointment with a virtual doctor and has pre-emptively revised her menu plan. That evening at home, Martin ports Pari into her favourite VR video game. Later, as she goes to bed, Martin plays a soothing soundtrack. The songs have been composed by an agent that understands Pari’s musical tastes and current emotional state. As Pari sleeps, Martin plans her next vacation.
Welcome to the era of human augmentation. Few would argue that we live in interesting times. Surrounded by the everyday miracles of smartphones and sensors, we are so inundated by stories about driverless cars that they already seem like old news — years before anybody in the world has even owned one. Now, consider something that is further in the future but truly unprecedented and revolutionary: We are entering the era of human augmentation.
While technology has always augmented human capabilities, the technologies that are now coming into their own, including artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, autonomous vehicles (AVS) and Blockchain, promise to go further. These breakthroughs are in turn generating new products and services, such as AVS, drones, robots and wearables. For the first time in human history, technologies will be able to act autonomously on our behalf, with far-reaching consequences for everything from work to marketing to regulation.
On a daily basis, we are bombarded with more data than our brains can process. AI already acts as an intelligent ‘consultant’, helping us make sense of this cognitive burden, from curating reading lists to navigating driving routes. Human augmentation technologies will soon assume even more agency by driving cars, automating jobs and making retail purchases. In doing so, they will blur the line between humans and machines, realigning societal norms and challenging entrenched perceptions of ourselves.
The Rise of the Super Consumer
The evolution and interplay of AI, machine learning, ever-present sensors, smart devices and new computing interfaces will take consumer empowerment to a whole new level — giving rise to tomorrow’s Super Consumer. A little like the fictional superheroes of comic books, super consumers can be defined as those who embrace new technologies such as AI, virtual reality, wearables and robotics to create smarter and more powerful extensions of themselves. Whether working, playing, eating, shopping, learning or pursuing healthier lifestyles, tomorrow’s super consumers will be augmented by technology in the service of achieving more informed and rich experiences across these different categories of living.
The expectations of today’s consumers are already high and rising: People expect their brand experiences to be unified and elegant across all touchpoints; they want to be recognized as individuals, have their likes and dislikes understood and remembered, receive advice perfectly aligned to their interests and purchase highly personalized products and services. They expect technology to help, not hinder, their quest to get what they want, where and when they want it. And, the price of a mistake is high. Forrester reports that consumers who experience disgust, anger or a feeling of neglect during a negative brand interaction are eight times more likely not to forgive that company than those who experience other forms of poor interaction.
While consumers’ expectations are high, reality lags behind — and some of the mismatch is technology-related. Today’s AI is good at performing narrowly-defined tasks, but less adept at completing generalized intelligence tasks that require humanlike reasoning: The multitude of ‘smart’ devices and systems on the market cannot inter-operate and quantum computing is immature and cannot, at present, meet the massive demand for additional processing power that increased data flows and sophisticated algorithms will require.
The rise of the super consumer will be a worldwide phenomenon, but could play out at different speeds and levels of complexity across the world. AI investment and adoption has increased dramatically in both China and India over the past few years, suggesting that Asia might well lead the way in terms of generating new super consumers. At the same time, persistent economic inequality and infrastructure disparities across the globe (and within nations themselves) could lead to a class of disempowered consumers who fail to benefit from the AI revolution.
In Europe and the U.S., concerns about privacy and the
Technologies will be able to act autonomously on our behalf, with far-reaching consequences.
ownership of one’s personal data are more than just a rumble, especially amid stories about high-profile data breaches, fears of government abuse of personal data and tales of personal virtual assistants spying on their owners. Will consumers continue to relinquish control of their data to providers in exchange for free services? Or, will part of becoming a super consumer involve monetizing one’s own personal information?
Generational differences may blunt some of these concerns. After all, digital natives have grown up in an environment where personal data is readily exchanged for convenient services and unique experiences. And, empowerment may not look as it does now. With the arrival of the Internet, consumers became directors of their own lives while sitting at keyboards and tapping on phones. But it’s a different kind of empowerment when people opt to become passive as computers make decisions for them. Some consumers may resist becoming ‘owned’ by one of the emerging AI ecosystems or delegating decisions to these ecosystems.
Rising expectations put the onus on companies to innovate now with tomorrow’s super consumer in mind. Seamless delivery of pleasing experiences across physical and digital realms, as well as disparate channels and devices, is the goal. Reaching it will require the right mix of new technology investments, especially those that will yield valuable data on current and prospective consumers.
Beyond determining the right mix of technology investments, companies must also re-engineer their business processes and operations to achieve a holistic view of the consumer across the entire brand journey, connecting fragmented technologies and data silos as part of this effort. The ecosystem of data providers and agencies that support marketing should also be integrated. But, ultimately, companies that thoughtfully consider what it means to be human in an intelligent machine era will create the brands that attract super consumers. Humans are verbal and conversational, as well as emotionally driven. From their providers, they want relevant and trusted interactions, frictionless transactions and rich experiences. The companies that can leverage technology and design to meet these criteria will be best positioned to serve tomorrow’s super consumer.
The Role of Behavioural Design
In recent years, two trends have moved the discipline of Behavioural Economics — which identifies biases in human economic behaviour — from the corridors of academia to mainstream market applications. First, many societal challenges
Will becoming a super consumer involve monetizing one’s own personal information?
aggravated by behaviour — climate change, chronic diseases and excessive debt — are becoming increasingly urgent and expensive. Second, mobile and social platforms are making it possible to measure and guide behaviours in real-world, real-time conditions like never before.
The next wave of technological disruption, human augmentation, will raise this challenge to a whole new level. While mobile and social platforms have been transformative in changing behaviour in real-time and real-world conditions, they still rely on human intervention. Human augmentation technologies promise to change that. Today, individuals managing their diet may need to constantly remember to enter meal details and calories in an app. In the future, AR could eliminate this step as smart eyeglasses and smart dishes automatically identify and capture meal data, enabling motivational ‘nudges’ based on more accurate and complete real-world information.
AI could enable personalization to a degree never before possible. For example, ‘digital twin’ avatars could show individuals the long-term consequences of their health decisions. Achieving this vision would deliver significant societal benefits, but getting to this optimistic future will require tremendous focus on behavioural design: designing products, features, interfaces and messaging that account for the cognitive biases that human augmentation technologies are likely to trigger.
Behavioural Economics offers three important insights for organizations as they enter the realm of human augmentation.
Human aug1. WE ARE PREDISPOSED TO FEAR NEW TECHNOLOGIES. mentation is sparking fears about everything from job losses to AV safety to the prospect of self-aware AI that threatens humanity. While every new technology creates some risks, several cognitive biases predispose humans to overestimate such threats. Probability neglect leads us to focus on the magnitude of outcomes (e.g. dying in a car crash) rather than their associated probabilities (e.g. automated vehicles are statistically safer than human drivers). To the extent that we process probabilities, we tend to overestimate small chances. The availability heuristic leads people to focus on and exaggerate the importance of readily available information. So, the barrage of news coverage about a single Tesla crash drowns out a sea of underlying data about AV safety. AI and AVS are already triggering such fears, and we expect more as technologies such as passenger drones and brain-machine interfaces come into their own.
The illusion of control bias predisposes 2. CONTROL IS IMPORTANT. us to want to feel that we have control, even in situations where we don’t. The ‘close door’ button in many elevators, for instance, does not affect how soon elevator doors shut; it merely gives users a sense of control. This aspect of human psychology will become increasingly relevant as human augmentation technologies start acting on our behalf. For instance, AVS could, in theory, enable a complete redesign of automotive cabins to look more like living rooms, but the need for control might instead dictate retaining steering wheels and brake pedals. Similarly, virtual shopping assistants could reinvent the shopping experience, but it is not yet clear whether consumers will be comfortable with surrendering control over their purchasing decisions.
As AI assis3. LIFELIKE INTERFACES TRIGGER HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY. tants, robots and VR become increasingly lifelike, they could
trigger cognitive biases. We have a deep-seated tendency to anthropomorphize — to attribute human-like qualities to— inanimate objects. Designers have embraced this tendency, for example, with car grills that subtly evoke a human smile. Robots and AI assistants will take anthropomorphism bias to a whole new level, with implications for user adoption and engagement.
Anthropomorphic design insights are already emerging. For instance, studies find that digital assistants are more likeable if they make small mistakes instead of operating flawlessly — a result known as the pratfall effect. Another bias, the uncanny valley, leads people to feel repulsed by robots or VR implementations that appear almost, but not quite, human. This suggests that developers might keep products from becoming too lifelike in the short run. Our tendency to anthropomorphize also raises concerns that our behaviours with lifelike machines might influence how we behave with other humans. For instance, will the license to behave cruelly towards a robot desensitize us in the way we treat each other?
In closing
Besides freeing us from mundane work, the combination of artificial and human intelligence will drive breakthrough discoveries. Human creativity and judgment augmented by the brute computational power of AI has already led to breakthroughs in energy generation and storage, drug therapies for genetically caused diseases and space exploration. Next, it could yield solutions to some of humanity’s most intractable problems.
What lies beyond could be even more transformative: A convergence of information technology, biotechnology and nanotechnology that promises to overhaul the very definition of what it means to be human. Neuroprosthetics, brain-machine interfaces, DNA editing, ingestible nanobots and embeddable radiofrequency identification (RFID) chips are still in labs. But, in the not-too-distant future, they may become the tools that upgrade us from organic to bionic. Only one thing is certain: The era of human augmentation is just beginning.
This article has been adapted from EY’S report, “The Upside of Disruption: Megatrends Shaping 2018 and Beyond”, which is available online. The sections excerpted in this article were written by Andrea Potter, Gautam Jaggi and Prianka Srinivasan, analysts at EYQ, EY’S global think tank dedicated to exploring ‘what’s next after what’s next?’