The Power of Human Adaptability

by Dr Ollie Hart

These days I find myself drawn to seeking out the strengths of humans. It's part of my work as a health coach. But right now, with so many potential challenges and threats I think it is helpful to tune into reasons to be optimistic about our future.

I would like to propose that our greatest human strength is our adaptability. It is one of most important assets and stands us apart from machines.

Probably like many I am both excited and terrified by the pace of change of tech and AI. It can start to feel like we’ll be left in the wake of machine learning, as AI takes over all the thinking and doing in our lives. I was starting to wonder how long we have before a small set of ‘tech controllers’ take over control of the world and how we all operate.

With the prompting of Dr Angus Parry, Antony Lawton and a few others, I started to take a look under the lid of AI. I have begun to appreciate the sheer scale and volume of data processing that it takes for machines to decode and then recode our language models. There are a huge series of parallel comparisons happening using 120,000 dimensional models! (I struggle to get my head around 4 dimensions!). With incredible computing power and speed, the models are able to consider the meaning, position and relationship of words, and snippets of our languages.

But no matter how clever the science and technology, these LLMs are still just making sense of what we have already conceived and recorded. They have been ‘taught’ using our collective historical back catalogue. Having been primed with this ‘learning’, these models use probability to predict what will be the most useful or thought-provoking response to our questions. The key for me is these models are nothing without our human involvement. The machines are predicting from pattern recognition what is most likely to impress us. But it means nothing without our brains to be impressed. Human language ultimately only means something to the humans that created it. LLMs give the impression of thinking, without really having any clue of the meaning or purpose of their outputs. This is my working understanding right now anyway, and I’m always open to refining it…

What I think AI can’t do is adapt in real time. They can’t sense in the way we can and respond dynamically to changes. Perhaps one day they will be able to, but I am reassured we are still a long way ahead. Take our ability to maintain optimal biological conditions like temperature, energy balance, water balance. We can adapt to a huge range of foods and fluids ingested and environmental conditions. In science we call this homeostasis- maintaining optimally stable internal conditions despite a range of challenges trying to disrupt us. This makes us very efficient and resilient.

The exciting part is how we must now use our incredible capability to adapt, to make best use of the accelerating pace of change of computing power. It is up to us to apply these new tools to generating more sophisticated and interesting cultures. We have a history of adopting to new tools to enhance our civilisations, from the hammer to the wheel to the internet. This our next exciting challenge.

I do accept that having a LLM that can help us recall and makes sense of everything that has ever been recorded about a topic or concept, is very helpful! Of course, this comes with concerns about the darker potential to manipulate people through programming bias and very subtle but powerful means of influence. As always, I think the mitigation to this is ensuring the general population remain in control of their own destiny. Just as health coaching is a method to orientate power and control around individual people and their local communities, we will need to extend these coaching principles to supporting people to make best use of AI.

As a bottom line I think we must retain the confidence in valuing who we each are as humans, and what we stand for. Within this we must remember the power we have in co-operating and collaborating as communities. Connecting our minds and applying our collective power has always enabled us to adapt and make progress.

(written without the help of AI)