Will.i.am: we are creating 'poverty in the mind'

Standing in silence in the snow-clad forests of Davos on the last day of the World Economic Forum (WEF) I learned as much about life as from all the many meetings I attended.

Caught up in the hectic schedule of events in the Swiss mountain resort, it is easy to forget what great musicians discover – that the music of life is defined by the silence between the notes. What I recognised as I breathed deeply among the alpine trees is just how little time delegates had to reflect on the volume of information and ideas they were fed during the week.

The greediness of consuming as much as possible, the fear of missing out and the pressure to leverage networks when you have spent a small fortune in WEF membership fees are powerful forces individually, but hold a vice like grip when working in parallel.

Even the pauses between events are filled with delegates glued to their smartphones, desperately trying to keep up with social media, emails and what’s happening back at the office.

Let’s hope they at least picked up the news that Pope Francis marked the church’s World Communications Day by urging people to relearn the art of talking to one another rather than generating and consuming information on social media sites.

Ironically, a key conversation in many of the sessions Davos delegates were racing to was burn out and how a loss of deep human connection to one other and to nature is at the root of our failure to live within planetary boundaries.

Technological advances may have allowed us to be far more productive, but have we now become enslaved to the machines that are becoming more intelligent and demanding by the day?

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff raised the question of the future impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) when he hosted a conversation with the CEOs of Microsoft, Yahoo and Bank of America, as well as columnist Thomas Friedman and musician and entrepreneur Will.i.am.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer pointed to studies which show we now check our phones on average 200 times a day, which is about every three minutes, and spend three hours looking at mobile apps, trumping the 2.45 hours we watch TV. Yet, at the same time, Mayer claimed that our easy access to data is providing us with more time to reflect.

Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan challenged this by highlighting the human skills being lost now that we have so much information available just a click away. He reminded the audience of the archetype of a true craftsman – “to measure twice and cut once”.

For Moynihan, at the heart of this is an issue of trust. He talked of the difficult balance he needs to strike between the growing power of AI and the need to maintain human relationships with the bank’s millions of customers. Looking ahead 10 years, he said that having a trusted relationship with customers would be paramount and that meant understanding the principles we live by and the purpose behind what we do.

This same balancing act was reflected by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who excitedly talked about the company’s newly launched holographic computer that allows people to create “mixed reality” by superimposing holograms on to reality; a few minutes later he expressed his concern that we are reaching the point where we are “not just enhancing the natural but replacing the natural”.

Friedman spoke of how the last chapter of a book he is writing is called “Thank you for being late” in appreciation of the valuable minutes of reflection he gets when people fail to arrive on time for meetings. He likewise poked fun at those using social media, saying young people who believe they are being activists by tweeting an issue they are concerned about was equivalent to “firing a mortar into the milky way galaxy”.

Musician and entrepreneur Will.i.am recognised the importance of creating stillness in our lives, but said that those who were worried about the advance of technology should not forget how it would transform the lives of people in the developing world. “I love the pause, but think of those people in the developing world who have been forcefully paused and idle for a very long time,” he said.

The lead singer of The Black Eyed Peas, however, warned that society was in the perverse position where more money was being spent on developing the abilities of computers than the abilities of young people to manage technology and their lives in general. “AI learning is trumping group learning,” he said. “We are creating a whole new type of poverty, which is poverty in the mind.”

This chimes with John Havens, who is currently finishing a book on quantifying our values and ethics in regard to AI. He told me that “machines are by nature heartless and thoughtless, and yet we’re working so hard to imbue them with replacements for these parts of us that would only be reflections of these human qualities we already possess.”

Like Havens, Salesforce’s Benioff points to the importance of knowing what is most important about the human experience. Quoting the Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, he told leaders in Davos to reflect on whether “you want to be number one, or you want to be happy.”

In fact, the Vietnamese monk visited WEF 14 years ago, pointing out to heads of state and business leaders that while WEF’s motto is “committed to improving the state of the world”, perhaps it would be better instead to adopt the motto “committed to improving the state of every heart”.

As it becomes increasingly hard to resist the temptations offered by the exponential growth in the power and sophistication of AI, his words are even more prescient today than they were at the turn of the century.

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