The industrial revolution brought with it upsets in technology the world had never before seen. Mass production paved the way for innovations beyond what our 18th-century counterparts could have begun to dream of. Within generations, the human race transitioned from being the center of power to being made keenly aware of their human limitations.

Steam-powered pulleys could lift objects magnitudes heavier than a single human could ever hope to. The Power Loom could weave large swaths of fabric in a fraction of the time it took to create that same fabric by hand. The printing press could produce professional and readable copies of knowledge so inexpensively people could share it worldwide en masse without ever having to deliver the information in person.

Today, modern mass production has made long-distance travel simple, global communication instantaneous and information storage so inexpensive as to render it effectively free. We have created fully digital humans, solved the games of Chess and Go and will soon have reliable self-driving vehicles.

Robots are efficient, fast, inexpensive and don’t get bored of repetitive tasks. Robots work tirelessly behind the scenes in education, business, religion, communication, politics and nearly everything else.

Robots are amazing at what they do.

When we consider how fast and far robots have taken our society, it’s little wonder we value their traits so highly. They embody all the attributes we wish we had as humans. Speed, efficiency, reliability, endless energy, upgradability, modularity. Robots are easy to understand, to categorize, to control. They are the ideal of simple, efficient, obedient productivity.

We value this robotic work ethic so highly, we’ve sought to imbue their robot levels of efficiency into every facet of our lives. Workplaces are steered by micro-calculations of profit margins. Schools implement standards of performance and test against that standard regularly.

There’s only one problem with this ideal.

I’m not a robot.

And neither are you.

Even though we humans can imagine a world of infinite productivity, we are not capable of achieving it alone. To do so, we need the help of our robot friends. While we humans can perform endless repetitive tasks or calculate thirty sheets of multi-variable calculus, it just doesn’t make sense to make that our sole focus.

We, humans, are built with different underlying technology, and are therefore inherently better at some kinds of things, while very bad at others.

If robots are good at performing rote tasks with expected structure, we humans excel at solving problems which vary between each iteration.

If robots are skilled in efficient performance, we humans excel at creative endeavors which often require multiple failures and attempts before we reach a level of success.

If robots learn best by being told exactly what to do and when to do it, we humans learn best reasoning through trial and error, gradually building a complicated and connected mess of principles which can be adapted to different situations.

If robots are standardized for mass production, we humans are individually unique and come equipped with a deep need for relationships and social connections. We’re sensitive to the emotions of others.

We, humans, dreamt of landing on the moon, an impossible and foolishly competitive dream with no solution, and then we did it! Imagine the coordination required to make the lunar landing happen with all of the unknown variables, personalities, skills, knowledge levels, political climate and the technology available at the time. When we fell short of capability, rather than giving up, we invented greater tools to make the job possible.

We humans wrote meaningful works of literature such as Les Misérables, Jane Eyre, and Don Quixote. We’ve created impactful films such as It’s a Wonderful Life, Interstellar, and Casablanca. We’ve composed musical allegories, and conveyed the impossible through paintings, graphic novels, videogames and radio broadcasts.

We humans broke the four-minute mile, flew around the entire world and transformed the high-desert wasteland of Utah into an international hub.

We, humans, are adaptable, creative and deeply rooted in empathy and connection.

While we, by design, rarely out-perform a robot at what it does best, it was our creativity and problem solving that invented them in the first place.

How sad it is then that we are fixated on ignoring our humanity in an attempt to become that robotic ideal. In trying to embody the unique skills imbued upon robots, we have inadvertently begun to destroy the beautiful organic humanity which makes us truly special.

The statistics are disheartening.

In the workplace, seven out of ten employees are not fully engaged. ‘Workers’ often describe feeling like a cog in a machine, stripped of the meaning we humans so naturally require to thrive.

Our Prussian-inspired education system is crashing around us in an expensive fireball with anywhere from 25% to 50% of all high school students dropping out before graduation. Meanwhile, the graduates are funneled into higher education where they emerge with an average of $37,000 worth of debt and barely any real-world experience, often making them too inexperienced for the pay their debt demands.

We use our social media not to connect, but to portray staged snapshots of fleeting perfection. We ‘share’ false moments of text, video or image, crafted with the intent to compare, categorize or display faux superiority rather than to uplift.

The United States of America boasts a sickening average of 94 suicides every single day. If the inability to achieve robot levels of perfection is the cause of even one death, it’s one death too many.

We decry the artist as destined to starve and champion the robotic stability of a well paying, but soul-crushing, career; all while terrified the robots will snatch our stability away like a rug out from underneath us.

In trying to become as perfect as the solution to our problems, we’ve forgotten what makes us perfect already.

I’m not a robot, and this is my manifesto.

It’s a call to arms, a cry for help from one human to another.

I need your help, and I need it very badly. Yes, your help, regardless of your age, gender, race or religious affiliation. In fact, I need your help specifically because of those differences.

I need you because we find ourselves at an interesting time in history. On the one hand, we’ve built many tools which free us up to focus on the principles that drive us as humans; connection, curiosity, and problem-solving. On the other hand, we refuse to embody these human principles and stubbornly cling to performing surface level actions better left to our robot inventions.

In so doing, not only do we rob ourselves of the adaptive growth we as humans are built for, but also selfishly deprive the rest of humanity of the progress robots were made to help us achieve in the first place.

This is not a battle cry against robots, but for humans. We’re the ones suffering from the actions of our own hands.

It seems we’ve been presented with an impossibly large problem, an issue which is unsolvable because it is global and systemic.

Conveniently, we humans are built to solve the unsolvable. We need to think differently. We need to adapt.

We are in dire need of curious, industrious and definitively human problem-solvers ready to work together. We need to gather and learn to speak amicably. We need to reason through our differences with words rather than regulations or threats. We must be interested in one another and be interesting ourselves.

Our robot tools make the kind of communication that was impossible even ten years ago something we now take for granted. We have the ability to gather together regardless of distance, collaborate in any language in real-time, and process swaths of data so large we need supercomputers to keep it all straight.

But progress is a double-edged sword, one that gives us a great opportunity for growth but also provides ample opportunity to disappoint. However, to be lazy is not a side effect of too much technology, but rather a lack of meaningful direction.

To reverse our misguided trajectory will take effort and strain. It will take additional time from our days as we map out and make sense of this new world we inhabit. It will make us feel unspeakably uncomfortable as we stare into the gaping maw of our flaws.

We must do this not because it is easy, but because it is hard.

We need to teach ourselves and our children how to be industrious and curious rather than cogs in a machine. We must be driven, of course, by the need to support and serve our loved ones, but also by our innate need to find meaning, purpose, and connection. We must develop the courage to make decisions and change our lives as necessary.

We must step away from solving our political issues the way we shop for technology, comparing features of competing brands as if they were little more than defective products. We must seek to understand our future leaders as organic humans and what their regulations will do to our society holistically.

It will require full utilization of every aspect of our brains, our bodies, and our souls. It will, at times, require tempering our immediate desires for something greater than what our mammalian or reptilian brains petulantly demand.

We must struggle to learn to communicate without pitchforks or flame wars. We’ll be required to define goals to problems that only we as humans can solve. We will need to collaborate on a massive scale with our newest tools, many of which have yet to be invented, to accomplish our human scale problems.

In short, we need to learn to be human.

To take the next giant leap for mankind, we need to, ironically, re-learn what our children already know; to be curious and inquisitive are our greatest strengths and give us the greatest joy.

Landing on the moon was a fantastic first step, but it’s nothing compared to what we will, as the unlocked human race, accomplish within the next decade.

The world has no idea how grand our next era is going to be, and that’s just the excitement of it!

I’m a human, and so are you. Let’s start treating each other like it.

#collaboration #published