Dystopian narratives about AI abound. Will the bots take over? Are we doomed as a human species? While I do not have a utopian outlook about our tech-saturated future, I do wonder what we could start doing today, in our present state, to course-correct these calamitous narratives. 

So, earlier this year I began conducting an informal thought experiment with approximately 50 people. I asked them to engage in the following pre-mortem exercise: “Imagine it is 10 years into the future, and the dystopian version of our world has come to be — that the bots have taken over. What is one mindset shift, one behavioral change, and one work process modification you would make today to prevent that dystopian future?” 

The themes of the responses were reassuring and affirming. In summary, people want transparency and to enact their agency by demanding ethically designed AI. They would ensure there was more pausing and slowing down in our workday in order to do deep thought. Interestingly, most people would design in friction, not eliminate it. They want embodied learning to ensure that we are not rushing ahead without thinking through the human dimension of our work. 

In short, we should scaffold AI output with human consciousness as inputs. 

The responses from this pre-mortem thought experiment demonstrate that we have an opportunity to shift mindset and behaviors right now. In an earlier Fast Company article I shared about something I call “sentient intelligence”: the internal sensory and emotional navigational console with which we humans are equipped to make sense of the world.

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