Unique Human Capacity Research Articles

Vox Populi, Vox ChatGPT: Large Language Models, Education and Democracy

In the era of generative AI and specifically large language models (LLMs), exemplified by ChatGPT, the intersection of artificial intelligence and human reasoning has become a focal point of global attention. Unlike conventional search engines, LLMs go beyond mere information retrieval, entering into the realm of discourse culture. Their outputs mimic well-considered, independent opinions or statements of facts, presenting a pretense of wisdom. This paper explores the potential transformative impact of LLMs on democratic societies. It delves into the concerns regarding the difficulty in distinguishing ChatGPT-generated texts from human output. The discussion emphasizes the essence of authorship, rooted in the unique human capacity for reason—a quality indispensable for democratic discourse and successful collaboration within free societies. Highlighting the potential threats to democracy, this paper presents three arguments: the Substitution argument, the Authenticity argument, and the Facts argument. These arguments highlight the potential risks that are associated with an overreliance on LLMs. The central thesis posits that widespread deployment of LLMs may adversely affect the fabric of a democracy if not comprehended and addressed proactively and properly. In proposing a solution, we advocate for an emphasis on education as a means to mitigate risks. We suggest cultivating thinking skills in children, fostering coherent thought formulation, and distinguishing between machine-generated output and genuine, i.e., human, reasoning. The focus should be on the responsible development and usage of LLMs, with the goal of augmenting human capacities in thinking, deliberating and decision-making rather than substituting them.

A Task-Interdependency Model of Complex Collaboration Towards Human-Centered Crowd Work (Extended Abstract)

Mathematical models of crowdsourcing and human computation today largely assume small modular tasks, "computational primitives" such as labels, comparisons, or votes requiring little coordination. However, while these models have successfully shown how crowds can accomplish significant objectives, they can inadvertently advance a less than human view of crowd workers where workers are treated as low skilled, replaceable, and untrustworthy, carrying out simple tasks in online labor markets for low pay under algorithmic management. They also fail to capture the unique human capacity for complex collaborative work where the main concerns are how to effectively structure, delegate, and collaborate on work that may be large in scope, underdefined, and highly interdependent. We present a model centered on interdependencies—a phenomenon well understood to be at the core of collaboration—that allows one to formally reason about diverse challenges to complex collaboration. Our model represents tasks as an interdependent collection of subtasks, formalized as a task graph. Each node is a subtask with an arbitrary size parameter. Interdependencies, represented as node and edge weights, impose costs on workers who need to spend time absorbing context of relevant work. Importantly, workers do not have to pay this context cost for work they did themselves. To illustrate how this simple model can be used to reason about diverse aspects of complex collaboration, we apply the model to diverse aspects of complex collaboration. We examine the limits of scaling complex crowd work, showing how high interdependencies and low task granularity bound work capacity to a constant factor of the contributions of top workers, which is in turn limited when workers are short-term novices. We examine recruitment and upskilling, showing the outsized role top workers play in determining work capacity, and surfacing insights on situated learning through a stylized model of legimitate peripheral participation (LPP). Finally, we turn to the economy as a setting where complex collaborative work already exists, using our model to explore the relationship between coordination intensity and occupational wages. Using occupational data from O*NET and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we introduce a new index of occupational coordination intensity and validate the predicted positive correlation. We find preliminary evidence that higher coordination intensity occupations are more resistant to displacement by AI based on historical growth in automation and OpenAI data on LLM exposure. Our hope is to spur further development of models that emphasize the collaborative capacities of human workers, bridge models of crowd work and traditional work, and promote AI in roles augmenting human collaboration. The full paper can be found at: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2309.00160.

Stakeholder theory: Exploring systems‐theoretic and process‐philosophic connections

AbstractModern stakeholder theory is premised on the ‘integration thesis’, according to which business and ethics constitute an inseparable unity. For many management scholars, this thesis raised the difficult question of how far business can pursue ethical goals without losing its functional autonomy. We address this question by interpreting the integration thesis as the Luhmannian ‘unity of difference’ of business and ethics. This interpretation allows business and ethics to remain conceptually distinct, yet takes their very distinction to constitute a logical and dialectical unity as envisioned by the integration thesis. To justify this interpretation, we draw on the Luhmannian systems theory which accentuates the precariousness of the environment faced by business corporations, and on process philosophy which underscores the unique human capacity to navigate this precariousness by following social norms of ethical behaviour. We argue that a key prerequisite of successful stakeholder management is the activation of this human capacity.

The 21st-Century Empowering Wholeness Adaptive (EWA) Educational Model Transforming Learning Capacity and Human Capital through Wholeness Systems Thinking towards a Sustainable Future

To meet the sustainability challenges in the 21st century, students need to develop a unique human learning capacity for creativity, responsibility, adaptation, meaningfulness, and lifelong learning. Furthermore, current changes in the societal environment have given rise to the need for a new learning strategy that guides learners in perceiving reality as an interrelated purposeful system with meaningful limits rather than collections of facts or systems without limits, as done so far. This paper aims to verify its hypothesis and introduce the 21st-century Empowering Wholeness Adaptive learning model (21st EWA Edu). This is a unique learning strategy that enables a meaningful transformation of learning capacity and creates a unifying learning system of dynamic content, didactics, knowledge, skills, competencies, understanding, values, and behaviors. Over three years, data from three cohorts of students at the School of Business Administration were collected. To assess the impact of the 21st EWA learning approach, both quantitative and qualitative methods of data collection and analysis were employed. The results suggest that the proposed model creates a learning system enabling the transformation of learning capacity while empowering students to become conscious and engaged lifelong learners, which is much needed for a truly sustainable future.

Teaching as evolutionary precursor to language

The central thesis of this article is that the evolution of teaching is one of the main factors that lead to increasingly complex communicative systems in the hominin species. Following earlier analyses of the evolution of teaching, the following steps are identified: (i) evaluative feedback, (ii) drawing attention, (iii) demonstration and pantomime, (iv) communicating concepts, (v) explaining relations between concepts, and (vi) narrating. For each of these step the communicative and cognitive demands will be analyzed. The focus will be on demonstration and pantomime, since these seem to be the evolutionarily earliest unique human capacities. An important step is the transition from pantomime for teaching to pantomime for informing and how this in turn leads to communicating concepts. As regards explaining relations between concepts, the focus will be of the role of generics in teaching and communication. Analyzing these topics involves combining cognitive science with evolutionary theory, archaeology and theories of communication. Two factors are important as a background: (i) the evolution of prospective planning, that is, planning for future goals, and (ii) the evolution of a theory mind. These capacities are central in explaining how more advanced forms of teaching, communication and cooperation emerged along the hominin line.

Why Do We Behave the Way We Do? Speaker to Pull Threads Together

Why Do We Behave the Way We Do? Speaker to Pull Threads Together

Our restless minds

Two brain circuits explain the unique human capacity for invention – an insight that may also shed light on the evolution of autism, says researcher Simon Baron-Cohen

What's So Special About Human Dignity?

What's So Special About Human Dignity?

The new division of labor between human and machine and its educational implications

The aim of the article is to clarify the future division of labor between human and machine and its educational implications. Recent studies on future employment discuss whether growth in computer power and advances in artificial intelligence enable the automation of non-routine tasks, including tasks that require creativity and innovation, which are among the most unique human capacities. However, this discussion generally lacks research-based concepts of creativity and innovation. In order to clarify the discussion on the division of labor, relevant theories of creativity and innovation are introduced. The inquiry shows that creativity and innovation consist in making new connections between domains or practices. While computers and robotics are capable of operating only within specific domains, in which rules apply or data are available, creativity and innovation operate beyond the boundaries of such domains and must be guided by emotions and driven by moods. This suggests that computers and robotics make rapid change possible, but cannot solve the task of creating change themselves. The educational implications are that it is vital to cultivate the unique human capacities of sensing, understanding, handling and creating change, and to teach students and employees to collaborate with computers and robotics.

Fundamental or forgotten? Is Pierre Paul Broca still relevant in modern neuroscience?

ABSTRACTThe ability to speak is a unique human capacity, but where is it located in our brains? This question is closely connected to the pioneering work of Pierre Paul Broca in the 1860s. Based on post-mortem observations of aphasic patients' brains, Broca located language production in the 3rd convolution of the left frontal lobe and thus reinitiated the localizationist view of brain functions. However, contemporary neuroscience has partially rejected this view in favor of a network-based perspective. This leads to the question, whether Broca's findings are still relevant today. In this mini-review, we discuss current and historical implications of Broca's work by focusing on his original contribution and contrasting it with contemporary knowledge. Borrowing from Broca's famous quote, our review shows that humans indeed “speak with the left hemisphere”– but Broca's area is not the sole “seat of articulatory language”.

Neuroscience and the Social Powers of Narrative: How Stories Configure Our Brains

Stories are important instruments for configuring our cognitive and social worlds, but they do not necessarily make us more caring or less aggressive and self-involved. The ability to tell and follow a story requires cognitive capacities that are basic to the neurobiology of mental functioning, and so it would stand to reason that our experiences with sto ries would draw on and re-shape patterns of interaction that extend beyond the immediate experience of reading or listening to a narrative. Our intuitive, bodily-based ability to understand the actions of other peo ple is fundamental to social relations, including the circuit between the representation of a configured action emplotted in a narrative and the reader’s or listener’s activity of following the story as we assimilate its patterns into the figures that shape our worlds. The activity of following a narrative can have a variety of beneficial or potentially noxious social consequences, either promoting the shared intentionality that neurobio logically oriented cultural anthropologists identify as a unique human capacity supporting culturally productive collaboration, or habitualizing and thereby naturalizing particular patterns of perception into rigid ideo logical constructs. The doubling of “me” and “not-me” in narrative acts of identification may promote the “we-intentionality” that makes socially beneficial cooperation possible, or it can set off mimetic conflict and vari ous contagion effects. Neuroscience cannot predict what the social conse quences of narrative will be, but it can identify the brain- and body-based processes through which (for better or worse) stories exercise social power.

Embodying Words: An Analysand’s Journal, 1941–1945

Embodying Words: An Analysand’s Journal, 1941–1945 Katherine Jenness (bio) I. The Journal In May of 1941, a 41-year-old woman residing in Los Angeles sought out psychiatric treatment to address lethargy and hopelessness related to recent professional disappointments. She and her psychiatrist promptly began psychoanalytic treatment, and her analyst made an unusual recommendation: in addition to their sessions, each day she would set aside time to write a journal about whatever came to mind. Perhaps this was a recommendation he gave all his patients, or perhaps only to her, a professional writer by trade. But write she did, prodigiously so, and we are left with a text comprising over 200,000 words (as a comparison, the story of Jane Eyre is told in 186,418). The journal offers an intimate and tremendously moving portrait of a life and a treatment. The analysand was Gladys Tilden. She hailed from a California family of some prominence. Upon her death she left her personal papers to the University of California at Berkeley and it was in the university archives that I stumbled upon her journal while completing research on an unrelated project. Titled “Autobiography for psychoanalysis, 1941–45,” it belongs to the Gladys Tilden Papers in the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Tilden wrote her journal on a typewriter, without page numbers, occasionally adding a handwritten marginal [End Page 213] note. All material quoted from the journal comes from this source and is available courtesy of the Bancroft Library. Although Gladys Tilden allowed the public to have full access to her papers, including her journal, to my knowledge her journal has not yet been discussed in print. Why then do I choose to write on it? I do so in part because I respect her choice to permit the public access to her journal, despite the highly personal details it contains.1 Even more importantly, I am strongly impressed by the sheer power of Tilden’s authorial voice. To read her journal is to become acquainted with a remarkable, tenacious woman with an inspired way of seeing the world and a lyrical way of expressing it. She can, in other words, speak for herself, and in what follows I have made an effort to quote her frequently. Such a rich document invites exploration on many fronts, but in this essay I focus on one dimension of the analysand’s journal in particular: her relationship with language. Gladys is irrepressibly verbal. She describes herself as a “pathological bookworm” and she is compelled not only to read but also to write and speak as well. Trying to stop writing is “like wringing the neck of a chicken.” With some interlocutors, she “can put in conversation for ten hours straight.” It is no surprise that she takes so readily to psychoanalysis, the talking cure, and to the task of journaling her free associations. This essay, therefore, gives close consideration to what words mean to the analysand. What does her volubility express and what does it obscure? How did her early experiences, which include being raised by deaf parents, shape the particular meanings language possesses for her? But the essay’s main concern, beyond the subjective experience of language, is how Gladys makes use of language in her journal. How does she write? And how does her writing change over the course of her treatment? Because we have so few written records of psychoanalytic treatments, her journal offers us a rare opportunity to track a patient’s written language over the course of an analytic process. Finally, this essay offers an application of Hans W. Loewald’s theories on language and psychoanalysis. As Loewald describes, language is a unique human capacity in that it “partakes” of both secondary and primary mental processes (1978/1980, p. [End Page 214] 179). We use words to name, refer, categorize, and conceptually link, but also to evoke, depict, and bring to life. Even though language is conscious and verbal by definition, it has the power to evoke experiences that lie well beyond the verbal. Psychoanalysis exploits this function of language at every turn: it is through speech that we beckon the pictorial landscapes of the unconscious, and...

Theory of Mind: Towards an Evolutionary Theory

Theory of mind is an important mental faculty. However, despite almost half a century of research, we only have a limited understanding of its evolutionary past. The present article proposes a novel hypothesis on the origin of this unique human capacity. According to this hypothesis theory of mind descended from two, closely related, defensive reactions, namely tonic immobility and immobilization stress. Both reactions are conserved in many vertebrate species and are highly prevalent in immature individuals. They are produced by a combination of manual handling and restraint (common in many nursing activities) and implicated in the management of stressful encounters. Most importantly, they have been shown to facilitate eye-contact, gaze-following, and intentional attributions. These traits, and several others detailed in the text, make them prime candidates in the search for the origin of theory of mind. The article presents conceptual arguments and empirical facts in support of this hypothesis.

Mind the gap: evolutionary psychological perspectives on human thriving

The amount of psychological literature focusing on human thriving and flourishing has grown in recent years, but this topic is currently subject to much conceptual ambiguity. Evolutionary psychology, though often not included in discussions on optimal human development, provides a framework that benefits considerations of human thriving. Humans exhibit a high degree of niche construction by which they alter their environment, in turn affecting their offspring. Such niche construction is enabled by unique human capacities, but these same capacities are then required to ‘mind the gap’ between human nature and the altered environmental niche. As such, thriving may in part be understood as the ability of the individual to navigate difficulties resulting from a mismatch between their nature and niche. Three unique features of the human species that are used to both create and navigate this gap are considered as they relate to the existing literature on human thriving.

Free will and the construction of options

What are the distinctive psychological features that explain why humans are free, but many other creatures, such as simple animals, are not? It is natural to think that the answer has something to do with unique human capacities for decision-making. Philosophical discussions of how decision-making works, however, are tellingly incomplete. In particular, these discussions invariably presuppose an agent who has a mentally represented set of options already fully in hand. The emphasis is largely on the selective processes that identify the options most worth doing and then execute them. But where do mentally represented sets of options come from in the first place? Once we focus on this constructive aspect of decision-making, an important fact becomes apparent: While the option sets of simpler animals are sharply limited, humans have a number of striking psychological powers—including remarkable powers of prospection and creativity—that enable them to construct option sets of unparalleled size and diversity. As a result, humans can express themselves in countless ways. This latitude for self-expression is, I argue, the distinctive feature that explains why humans are free.

How institutions shaped the last major evolutionary transition to large-scale human societies.

What drove the transition from small-scale human societies centred on kinship and personal exchange, to large-scale societies comprising cooperation and division of labour among untold numbers of unrelated individuals? We propose that the unique human capacity to negotiate institutional rules that coordinate social actions was a key driver of this transition. By creating institutions, humans have been able to move from the default 'Hobbesian' rules of the 'game of life', determined by physical/environmental constraints, into self-created rules of social organization where cooperation can be individually advantageous even in large groups of unrelated individuals. Examples include rules of food sharing in hunter-gatherers, rules for the usage of irrigation systems in agriculturalists, property rights and systems for sharing reputation between mediaeval traders. Successful institutions create rules of interaction that are self-enforcing, providing direct benefits both to individuals that follow them, and to individuals that sanction rule breakers. Forming institutions requires shared intentionality, language and other cognitive abilities largely absent in other primates. We explain how cooperative breeding likely selected for these abilities early in the Homo lineage. This allowed anatomically modern humans to create institutions that transformed the self-reliance of our primate ancestors into the division of labour of large-scale human social organization.

Being human in a global age of technology.

This philosophical enquiry considers the impact of a global world view and technology on the meaning of being human. The global vision increases our awareness of the common bond between all humans, while technology tends to separate us from an understanding of ourselves as human persons. We review some advances in connecting as community within our world, and many examples of technological changes. This review is not exhaustive. The focus is to understand enough changes to think through the possibility of healthcare professionals becoming cyborgs, human-machine units that are subsequently neither human and nor machine. It is seen that human technology interfaces are a different way of interacting but do not change what it is to be human in our rational capacities of providing meaningful speech and freely chosen actions. In the highly technical environment of the ICU, expert nurses work in harmony with both the technical equipment and the patient. We used Heidegger to consider the nature of equipment, and Descartes to explore unique human capacities. Aristotle, Wallace, Sokolowski, and Clarke provide a summary of humanity as substantial and relational.

Genetics and the Language Sciences

Theories addressing the biological basis of language must be built on an appreciation of the ways that molecular and neurobiological substrates can contribute to aspects of human cognition. Here, we lay out the principles by which a genome could potentially encode the necessary information to produce a language-ready brain. We describe what genes are; how they are regulated; and how they affect the formation, function, and plasticity of neuronal circuits. At each step, we give examples of molecules implicated in pathways that are important for speech and language. Finally, we discuss technological advances in genomics that are revealing considerable genotypic variation in the human population, from rare mutations to common polymorphisms, with the potential to relate this variation to natural variability in speech and language skills. Moving forward, an interdisciplinary approach to the language sciences, integrating genetics, neurobiology, psychology, and linguistics, will be essential for a complete understanding of our unique human capacities.

Forecasting life satisfaction across adulthood: Benefits of seeing a dark future?

Anticipating one's future self is a unique human capacity that contributes importantly to adaptation and health throughout adulthood and old age. Using the adult life span sample of the national German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP; N > 10,000, age range 18 to 96 years), we investigated age-differential stability, correlates, and outcomes of accuracy in anticipation of future life satisfaction across 6 subsequent 5-year time intervals. As expected, we observed few age differences in current life satisfaction but stronger age differences in future expectations: Younger adults anticipated improved future life satisfaction, overestimating their actual life satisfaction 5 years later. By contrast, older adults were more pessimistic about the future, generally underestimating their actual life satisfaction after 5 years. Such age differences persisted above and beyond the effects of self-rated health and income. Survival analyses revealed that, in later adulthood, underestimating one's life satisfaction 5 years later was related to lower hazard ratios for disability (n = 735 became disabled) and mortality (n = 879 died) across 10 or more years, even after controlling for age, sex, education, income, and self-rated health. Findings suggest that older adults are more likely to underestimate their life satisfaction in the future and that such underestimation was associated with positive health outcomes.

Forecasting Life Satisfaction Across Adulthood: Benefits of Seeing a Dark Future?

Anticipating one’s future self is a unique human capacity that contributes importantly to adaptation and health throughout adulthood and old age. Using the adult lifespan sample of the national German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP; N > 10,000, age range 18-96 years), we investigated age-differential stability, correlates, and outcomes of accuracy in anticipation of future life satisfaction across six subsequent 5-year time intervals. As expected, we observed few age differences in current life satisfaction, but stronger age differences in future expectations: Younger adults anticipated improved future life satisfaction, overestimating their actual life satisfaction 5 years later. By contrast, older adults were more pessimistic about the future, generally underestimating their actual life satisfaction after 5 years. Such age differences persisted above and beyond the effects of self-rated health and income. Survival analyses revealed that in later adulthood, underestimating one’s life satisfaction 5 years later was related to lower hazard ratios for disability (n = 735 became disabled) and mortality (n = 879 died) across 10 or more years, even after controlling for age, sex, education, income, and self-rated health. Findings suggest that older adults are more likely to underestimate their life satisfaction in the future, and that such underestimation was associated with positive health outcomes.