Rainie discusses the special value of human knowledge as AI tools keep improving

Lee Rainie, director of the Imagining the Digital Future Center, spoke at a conference of knowledge managers about the special virtues of human reasoning, moral judgment, emotional smarts, creativity, meta-cognition and abstract thinking.

Artificial intelligence systems are getting smarter and have surpassed human intelligence in a variety of domains. Thus, the question is, as greater intelligence appears around us, what will happen to the very human concerns about dignity, identity, and agency?

Lee Rainie, director of the Imagining the Digital Future Center, has been studying these issues at Elon’s Imagining the Digital Future Center, and shared the Center’s findings at the Enterprise AI World conference for corporate “knowledge managers” in Washington, D.C. on Nov. 20.

He noted that the shifting boundary between people and machines raises big questions about who we are, what we do, how we connect and how we think. He argued that there are six special dimensions of human intelligence that will become increasingly valued: human reasoning, moral judgment, emotional smarts, creativity, meta-cognition and abstract thinking.