Tomorrow’s Trivial Pursuits

It’s 1984. A board game called Trivial Pursuit is all the rage. You’re sitting around the table with friends, answering random questions about home run champions, flower species, poets, and international borders. You love Trivial Pursuit because you know lots of random stuff, and, circa 1984, “knowing stuff” is a virtue. Part of what makes you smart.

Your buddy Norm asks the group his own trivia question. "Who won Best Picture in 1974?". Your know-it-all friend Cliff asserts 'The Godfather', but you insist it's 'The Sting'. Debate ensues, you all enjoy the bicker, and you conclude with a bet. Because the only way to get to a definitive answer on something so arcane is to head to the town library or bookstore the next morning, wine cooler hangover be damned.

But now it’s 1994, and that hike to the library is just a jaunt to the PC in your basement. And now it’s 2004 and a few paces to the laptop in your kitchen. And now it’s 2014, and a reach to the supercomputer in your pocket. Today you just ask your wrist (and find out that you were right about The Sting).

In a world of digitally outsourced memory, knowing things is no longer nearly as big a part of what it means to be smart. Knowing how and where to store and find things… That’s been the ticket. Between digital to-do lists, password managers, calendars, notes, and cloud storage, our digital memories augment our physical memories and give all of us, by 1984 standards, photographic memories.

But we barely notice this profound superpower because we’ve had a full generation to norm to the idea that machines are simply better at remembering than us. No contest.

On the flip side, most of us have had less than a year to start to get our heads around the idea that machines are (or soon will be) far better at thinking than us too. No contest.

Photo by Joel Abraham on Unsplash

From discernment and decision-making to, more recently, syntax, style & synthesis, mechanical minds are quickly making the jump from “adorable monkey tricks” to something that might rightly be called super-intelligent.

If facility with storing and finding information accounts for human smarts in a world where knowledge/memory is better left to machines, what will be our uniquely human role in a world where thinking is increasingly outsourced too?

I’d posit that the thing which will (and is already beginning to) separate leaders from laggards is ingenuity. The mix of curiosity, imagination and proactive moxie that combine to t/ask super intelligent machines to achieve great things. This, I’d argue, is what tomorrow’s smart will look like.

But what great things? What higher-order pursuits?

Now there's a uniquely non-trivial (and human) problem worth solving.

Mike Bechtel - Chief futurist | Deloitte Consulting LLP