Wim's Water Wisdom - May 2025

Human amplification over automation: escaping the static skills trap

[Wim's Water Wisdom - AM-Team's monthly opinion piece - May 2025]

The landscape of human competence, by Hans Moravec, is an image I very often use in keynotes. I discovered it by reading Max Tegmark's book 'Life 3.0 - being human in the age of artificial intelligence'.

The image (Figure 1) describes a landscape that shows what humans can do better than computer algorithms. The rising water that gradually floods the land is what computers can do better. In the 90s, we already knew that computers could beat us in chess. But only since 2015 we know that AI can beat humans in Go. A game with more combinations than stars in the universe(i.e. impossible to hard code all the moves). This caused a paradigm shift in how we look at capabilities of models.

It is since that moment in 2015, that the use of phraseslike ‘digitalisation’, ‘digital water’, ‘digital twins’, ... exploded. Toillustrate this, let’s look at Figure 2, showing the use of the phrase ‘digitaltwin’ in literature as function of time.

Fascinating is that in the 90s, book writing, science, art, programming,... were considered very high mountains, difficult to be flooded. Self driving was considered lowland. But today, I think we would agree that this landscapene eds an update.

However, which human competences will be replaced first is not the point. The point is that this concept only looks at flooding, with human skills being static mountains and computers gradually taking over. Something might be missing, and therefore I asked AI to generate an updated image.

What we were missing was an iceberg: mountains of human competences that rise WITH the water. Skills that amplify when computer capabilities grow.(referred to by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman as 'human amplification' or'amplified intelligence').

We have static mountains that will get flooded completely.It's happening at rapid pace. And we'll have growing icebergs and completely new icebergs forming. It is hence key to look at your own business and job and ask yourself the question on which type of mountain you are: a static or a dynamic one. It's a smart move to plan an escape from the static ones and consider building competences on the emerging icebergs.

Our most successful applications of AM-Team’s models and digital twins in the water industry in are not the ones that replace humans.It's the ones that give them super powers. Getting staff trained faster. Letting them make more complex decisions,better and faster. Letting them communicate more effectively in big organisations. A great business case is human amplification.

The April ’25 opinion piece summarised the 5 different use cases for digital twins. 4 out of those 5 were directly related to human amplification.

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‍Wim's Water Wisdom is a monthly op-ed from Dr. Wim Audenaert, CEO & Co-founder of AM Team shedding light on today's and tomorrow's challenges, opportunities and trends in the water industry. This month's piece invites for a balanced approach to digitalisation in water and wastewater treatment.    

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