Genesis: Human Experience in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Why we need to be long and not short on humanity and AI, not humanity or AI, to create a sustained future, together

By Luke Soon

I delve into the interplay between CX and EX, exploring why their fusion equals a comprehensive human experience.

I dug deeper to find out why trust is the linchpin of the human experience, how great human societies were built, and examine its profound impact; we are living in a hyper-trust deficit world. It’s getting exponentially easier to connect us humans, but also exponentially harder to distill #trust—as machines and AI get thrown into the mix. Again, we must go long on #humanity and AI and not short on humanity or AI.

The fun part, with creative freedom, the book also includes a series of fictional short stories, my utopian take on how the world might be like in the near-distant future year 2050.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing Singapore
• Release date: Nov 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9781543781083

Book preview

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To my daughter Mila, who will be shaping the future of humanity; new realities in a future where Humanity x AI will reach for the stars…

GENESIS

HUMAN EXPERIENCE IN THE AGE

OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Why we need to be long and not short on humanity and AI, not humanity or AI, to create a sustained future, together

@mentalmarketer Luke Soon

Copyright © 2023 by @mentalmarketer Luke Soon.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

www.partridgepublishing.com/singapore

Contents

1

1.1 Capital Usage

1.1.1 Lack of Priority for Innovation in Many Companies

1.1.2 Measuring Innovation Capital

1.1.3 Challenges and Opportunities for Leveraging Innovation Capital

1.2 Equity vs Efficiency

1.2.1 New Arguments for Distributive Equity

1.2.2 Inequality and Economic Growth

1.2.3 Causes of Rising Inequality in Developed Countries

1.3 Product Lifecycle

1.3.1 Equity and Product Lifecycle

1.3.2 Interventions to Achieve Equity in Innovation

2

2.1 Everyone Stays Home, the World Gets Delivered (Unwritten)

2.2 Democratization of the Metaverse

2.2.1 The Role of Cryptocurrency in HX

2.2.2 Token Systems and Blockchain Technology

2.2.3 The Metaverse and Personalization

2.2.4 The Future of the Metaverse

2.3 Experience and Equity

2.3.1 Mitigating Bad Behaviour

2.3.2 The Value of Gaming in the Metaverse

2.3.3 HX = CX + EX

2.4 Humanity and Artificial Intelligence in the Metaverse

2.4.1 Role of AI in the Metaverse

2.4.2 Digital Humans in the Metaverse

3

3.1 Rox as Asset Class (Unwritten)

3.2 Short-Term vs Long-Term Focus (Unwritten)

3.3 Experience-Led Transformation (Unwritten)

3.4 HX =CX + EX

3.5 Journey Mapping

3.5.1 Enjoyable Experiences Add Value

3.5.2 Experience Will Be the Purpose

3.5.3 The Three-Act Play

3.6 Childhood: Empathy Is Learned through Trust

3.6.1 Gaining Authority over What Goes on Our Feet

3.6.2 Trust as Currency

3.7 Life Is an Evolving Series of Journeys

3.7.1 All Journeys Engage in Commerce

3.7.2 In Improvement and Betterment, We Ascend

4

Everyone Stays Home, the World Gets Delivered

Democratization of the Metaverse

Terraforming HX with Crypto, Blockchain, and AI

Walking Back the Future

AI: An Evolutionary Step Forwards

Humanity and Artificial Intelligence in the Metaverse

Role of AI in the Metaverse

The Rescue Mission (Fiction)

Experience and Equity

Mitigating Bad Behavior

The Value of Gaming in the Metaverse

HX = CX + EX

The Metaverse and Personalization

The Future Of The Metaverse

Digital Humans in the Metaverse

The Big Guy (Fiction)

5

ROX as Asset Class

Are You Transactors or Transcenders?

ROX: A Symphony of Stars

The Odyssey Ahead

Short-Term vs Long-Term Focus

Experience-Led Transformation

Transformation: Visioning Beyond the Present

The Symphony of Synergy: A Dance of Experience and Evolution

The Luminescent Path Ahead

Journey Mapping

Enjoyable Experiences Add Value

Experience Will Be the Purpose

The Three-Act Play

The Longest Divide (Fiction)

Childhood: Empathy Is Learned through Trust

Gaining Authority over What Goes on Our Feet

Trust as Currency

The Third Date (Fiction)

Life Is an Evolving Series of Journeys

All Journeys Engage in Commerce

In Improvement and Betterment, We Ascend

1

1.1 Capital Usage

A story about the early days of The Ford Motor Company goes something like this: a US government official came to tour the assembly-line marvel that was the Ford Piquette Avenue Plant in Detroit, Ford’s first company-owned factory. Accompanied by Henry Ford, the official walked the factory floor. He talked to workers and congratulated ol’ Henry on the efficiency of the plant.

On his way out, the official noticed one solitary man sitting with his feet up on a desk, watching the other workers. He asked Henry Ford what the man was doing. The official didn’t think the man was being very efficient. Henry Ford said to him, ‘He’s the one who thinks all this up.’ That man was Mechanical Engineer Frederick Taylor. He spent his workday watching the factory floor inventing new ways of organizing work. His innovative work processes succeeded in realizing Henry Ford’s dream of an affordable car.

It’s simple. Companies that trust in spending on innovation best leverage their growth. In the 2020s, these companies will disrupt old markets and invent new ones.

1.1.1 Lack of Priority for Innovation in Many Companies

Unfortunately, tight-fisted clutching to traditional metrics reigns in many of today’s board rooms. Today, instead of innovation, it’s about what fast value-creating activities will create the highest ROI. As a result, tomorrow’s corporate crises will result from today’s lack of future-realistic goals.

So why is innovation a minimized priority in many companies?

The star fund manager and chief executive of ARK Invest, Cathie Wood, has a good take on this. She told MarketWatch in early 2022 that lack of capital investment in innovation in favor of benchmarks was ‘the most massive misallocation of capital in the history of mankind.’ Her quote is an example of righteous forward-thinking and great top-shelf alliteration.

According to S&P Global Ratings, capital spending by major corporations worldwide is expected to rise 6.1% this year from 2021 levels, which includes the top 2,000 non-financial corporations in the world with the highest capital account spending. However, according to S&P Global Ratings, capital spending by large non-financial corporations worldwide declined by about 4% in 2020, after increasing by about 2% in the last fiscal year. So pandemics being what they are, capital spending has been flat over several years.

1.1.2 Measuring Innovation Capital

But that’s just measuring overall capital spending. As for an even greater trend toward myopic planning, PWCs Comparison of Innovation Spending and Revenue revealed that only about 5% of capital spending goes to innovation, a woefully small amount given the impact of innovation and disruption over the last thirty years. Moreover, the Great Recession, amplified by the pandemic, has led investors to shy away from innovation and embrace benchmarks.

Innovation capital is the sum of all knowledge, talent, reach, and cash a company possesses that contribute to the development and change needed to disrupt an industry or sector for the benefit of the marketplace. Disruptive products tend to alter specific tasks. For example, take accessories for personal transport (other than your feet). First, buggy whips disappeared long ago. Then, keychains became ubiquitous. Today, more and more people start their vehicles with their phones.

How many other products came and went as horses turned into automobiles? Carriages became cabins. Saddles became seats. Whistling became radios. (OK, whistling is not a product, save maybe for the sheet music.)

Innovation capital is one of the main catalysts for creating value, but it’s not even on most people’s radar. Today, our challenge is to reimagine capital as we move from a service economy to an experience economy.

1.1.3 Challenges and Opportunities for Leveraging Innovation Capital

The challenge is knowing how to truly leverage innovation capital as it evolves to meet new challenges, create new opportunities, and ensure sustainable success. We need to understand what is and is not essential to the innovation challenges we may be addressing.

The more dynamic the challenges, the more they will influence the organization’s ability to create value or not. Innovation is fundamental to value creation as it aims to develop and implement new outcomes that differentiate an organization from others.

As we develop our networks and relationships, we expand knowledge sharing. The patterns discernable in sharing, communicating, and testing new ideas give more intangible assets within the organization. As we deepen our knowledge, we gain experience and higher pattern recognition and understand paths to innovative possibilities.

An understanding of the actual value of innovation needs to advance. More and more companies will continue to get it; some won’t.

1.2 Equity vs Efficiency

The belief that promoting equality requires sacrificing economic efficiency is based on one of the most beloved ideas in economics: incentives. The idea goes like this: businesses and individuals need the prospect of higher incomes to save, invest, work hard, and innovate. If taxing profitable companies and wealthy households blunts these prospects, the result is reduced effort and reduced economic growth.

The trade-off between efficiency and equity occurs when maximizing economic efficiency decreases fairness by distributing its wealth or income unequally. In the pantheon of economic theories, the trade-off between equality and efficiency held a lofty place. In the later decades of the twentieth century, the consensus was that a natural struggle existed between the two values. As recently as 2007, New York University economist Thomas Sargent stocked the compromise among a Berkeley graduation address on the wisdom of economics.

In the real world, one can just read any American conservative blog to find out Communist state experiments are ‘evidence’ of economic disaster because they refused to honor the compromise. However, neither economic theory nor empirical evidence agrees with the proposed compromise in recent years. On the contrary, economists have advanced new arguments for why good economic performance is not only compatible with distributive equity but may even require it.

For example, economic growth slows down in highly unequal societies where low-income families are deprived of economic and educational opportunities. Then there are the Scandinavian countries, where egalitarian policies have not prevented economic prosperity.

1.2.1 New Arguments for Distributive Equity

IMF economists presented empirical results earlier this year that demonstrated greater equity serves faster medium-term growth. In addition, redistributive policies did not appear to harm economic performance.

In that sense, we can have our cake and eat it too.

The result has surprised many economists, especially since it comes from the IMF, an institution little known for its unorthodox or radical ideas. Thus, the emerging new consensus on the harmful effects of inequality is gaining traction among mainstream economists.

In an emerging economy where most of the workforce is employed in traditional agriculture, the expansion of urban industrial capacity is likely to lead to inequality, at least in the early stages of industrialization. The income gap widened as farmers move to cities and earned higher wages. However, the process that drives economic growth is the same. All prosperous countries have experienced this. In China, for example, rapid economic growth since the late 1970s has been associated with a marked increase in inequality. About half of the growth results from the urban-rural wage gap.

Or consider a transfer policy that taxes the rich and middle class to increase the income of poor households. Many Latin American countries, such as Mexico and Bolivia, pursue transfer policies with fiscal prudence to ensure that government deficits do not lead to high debt and macroeconomic instability. On the other hand, under the leadership of Hugo Chavez and his successor, Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela’s radical redistribution diverts funds from temporary oil revenues, jeopardizing diversions, and macroeconomic stability.

1.2.2 Inequality and Economic Growth

Latin America is the only region in the world where inequality has declined since the early 1990s.

Improvements in social policy and increased investment in education have been significant factors. But lessening the wage gap between skilled and unskilled workers—what economists call a ‘skills bonus’—also plays an important role. Whether this is good or bad news for economic growth depends on why the skill premium has fallen.

Suppose the wage gap narrowed due to an increase in the relative supply of skilled workers. In that case, we can hope that reducing inequality in Latin America will not impede faster growth (and may even be an early indicator). But if the main reason is the declining demand for skilled workers, a more negligible difference would mean that today’s knowledge-intensive industries are not expanding enough on which future growth depends.

1.2.3 Causes of Rising Inequality in Developed Countries

In developed countries, the causes of rising inequality are still being debated. Automation and other technological changes, globalization, the weakening of unions, the erosion of the minimum wage, financialization, and changing norms for the acceptable wage gap within companies have all played a role, with varying weights in the US and Europe. Each of these factors affects growth differently. For example, while technological progress is fueling growth, the boom in finance since the 1990s has likely had adverse effects due to financial crises and debt accumulation.

It’s good that economists no longer view the trade-off between equity and efficiency as an ironclad law. After all, there is only one universal truth in economics: everything depends.

1.3 Product Lifecycle

The product lifecycle starts when a product is under development and ends after removal from the market. So whether you’re watching a nearly obsolete DVD or buying a newly released smartphone, you’re participating and going through the different stages of a product. When a product enters the market, it has a life cycle that goes from being new and useful to being tired and outmoded. Eventually, a product is withdrawn from the retail market entirely.

But wait! Does that mean that a withdrawn product has no value? No. Collectible and antique stores are two traditional retailers that thrive on the experience of a product, the joy of finding a sought-after item to add to a collection, the afternoon of picking through second-hand and antique stores, the dinner on the way home after a successful hunt. The product, in this case, is secondary. Every antique store offers a discovery experience that contains the potential of a physical product within it. Every smart business district surrounds its antique shops with exciting and unique restaurants.

What happens when marketers apply the same experience strategy to primary retail?

While some products may remain in a mature state for a long time, all companies eventually remove their products from the market due to a combination of factors, such as saturation, increased competition, declining demand, and declining sales.

Arm and Hammer Baking Soda has been on store shelves since 1846. The original iPhone lasted thirteen months. The experience of Arm and Hammer Baking Soda offers, among other things, a clean-smelling refrigerator. Not much room to improve on that. The iPhone needs to offer continually upgraded experiences because the technological capabilities lag behind our imaginations. Once my problem of a smelly fridge is solved, the job is done. But I can probably be convinced every eighteen months that I need better resolution and color in my smartphone.

The experience is key. Currently, I’m in the minority on that thinking. The supremacy of service continues to dominate the thoughts of company executives and board members.

The idea that products can continue to distinguish themselves through constant service improvements ignores customer signals about their desires. A ubiquitousness has evolved over the pandemic with delivery services for essential goods. We love it. It works. We’re going to continue to use it. Similar attempts at mass-scale home delivery have failed in various attempts since the 1950s. In the 1990s, like WebVan and Urbanfetch, efforts lost valuations totaling $6B in just a few years. What’s different? The pandemic?