Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The writer is inaugural DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Cambridge and author of ‘The Atomic Human: Understanding Ourselves in the Age of AI’The philosopher’s stone is a mythical material that can convert base metals to gold. In our modern economy, automation has the same effect. During the industrial revolution, steel and steam replaced human manual labour. Today, silicon and electrons are being combined to replace human mental labour. This transformation creates efficiency. But it also devalues the skills that form the backbone of human capital and create a happy, healthy society. Had the alchemists ever discovered the philosopher’s stone, using it would have triggered mass inflation and devalued any reserves of gold. Similarly, our reserve of precious human capital is vulnerable to automation and devaluation in the artificial intelligence revolution. The skills we have learnt, whether manual or mental, risk becoming redundant in the face of the machine. Will AI totally displace the human? Or is there any form, a core, an irreducible element of human attention that the machine cannot replace? If so, this would be a robust foundation on which to build our digital futures. I call this kernel the “atomic human”. Unfortunately, when we seek it out, we are faced with a form of uncertainty principle. Machines rely on measurable outputs, meaning any aspect of human ability that can be quantified is at risk of automation. But the most essential aspects of humanity are the hardest to measure. We won’t find the atomic human in the percentage of A grades that our children are achieving at schools or the length of waiting lists we have in our hospitals. It sits behind all this. We see the atomic human in the way a nurse spends an extra few minutes ensuring a patient is comfortable or a bus driver pauses to allow a pensioner to cross the road or a teacher praises a struggling student to build their confidence.Thus we face a new productivity paradox. The classical tools of economic intervention cannot map hard-to-measure supply and demand of quality human attention. So how do we build a new economy that utilises our lead in human capital and delivers the digital future we aspire to? One answer is to look at the human capital index. This measures the quality and quantity of the attention economy via the health and education of our population.The attention economy was a phenomenon described in 1971 by the American computer scientist Herbert Simon. He saw the coming information revolution and wrote that a wealth of information would create a poverty of attention. Too much information means that human attention becomes the scarce resource, the bottleneck. It becomes the gold in the attention economy. Fortunately, this is one area where the UK is a leading international economy. Under the World Bank’s human capital index, we outperform both the USA and China. We need to value this and find a way to reinvest human capital, returning the value of the human back into the system when considering productivity gains from technology like AI. This means a tighter mapping between what the public want and what the innovation economy delivers. It means more agile policy that responds to public dialogue with tangible solutions co-created with the people who are doing the actual work. It means, for example, freeing up a nurse’s time with technology tools and allowing them to spend that time with patients.To deliver this, our academic institutions need to step up.Too often in the past, we have been distant from the difficulties that society faces. We have been too remote from the real challenges of everyday lives — challenges that don’t make the covers of prestige science magazines. People are rightly angry that innovations like AI have yet to address the problems they face, including in health, social care and education. Of course, universities cannot fix this on their own, but academics can operate as honest brokers that bridge gaps between public and private considerations, convene different groups and understand, celebrate and empower the contributions of individuals. This requires people who are prepared to dedicate their time to improving each other’s lives, developing new best practices and sharing them with colleagues and coworkers.To preserve our human capital and harness our potential, we need the AI alchemists to provide us with solutions that can serve both science and society.
