In an entertaining TEDx talk recently, inventor and hacker Pablos Holman addresses the intriguing question: How to become relevant when a robot takes your job.

Holman’s analysis differs from most of the discussion on this issue in a key respect. It is common to encounter views that focus on strategies for remaining employable in a world driven by artificial intelligence, the social and psychological impacts on people who become irrelevant to the new economy, and so on.

However, Holman sees the human race reaching a fundamental turning point in its evolution as a result of the technological breakthroughs that have taken place over the last two centuries.

He posits that the human capacity for innovation (we are the only species that has invented the hula hoop) has enabled us to win the battle for survival, as seen in the exponential growth in world population in the current geological era.

At this juncture, Holman points out, we have solved all the hard technological questions that had kept humans from thriving — feeding the world’s population, creating jobs, eradicating disease, providing housing and so on.

“We’re kind of running out of problems here,” he says of the rich world, in particular.

Now, according to Holman, the challenge is to address the additional problems that are posed by the success of the human species.

“Try to take on a problem that you don’t have,” he tells his Silicon Valley audience, “that a billion people have who don’t have the education, resources and experience that you have. That’s harder, but I think, that’s the important thing.”

At Intellectual Ventures, where Holman is the resident futurist, researchers have developed a number of remarkable solutions to pressing global problems.

They include Arktek, a super-efficient vaccine storage device that requires no external power supply, allowing it to keep vaccines cold for over a month even in places with no reliable electricity. It addresses the loss of some 250,000 lives in rural Africa each year to diseases that children contract via expired vaccines.

With advances like this, humans have won the game of evolutionary biology, which boils down to figuring out how to survive as a species.

In essence, we have progressed from natural selection, which takes generations of weeding out the weak members of a species, to evolving in a single generation through innovation.

“Congratulations, we’ve survived. Now what do we do with all these surplus humans?” he asks, tongue-in-cheek.

Sometime in the past two centuries, Holman says, our race passed an important inflection point. From a period where everyone needed to work, thanks to technology, now, not everybody needed to do so all the time.

Putting that free time to good use, humans created the entertainment industry, which has seen a creative explosion in recent decades.

“At some point, we hit peak entertainment,” says Holman. “We have enough entertainment to fill several lifetimes.” So, we’re not worried about how to fill our free time any more.

“Now, something important is about to happen,” says the futurist. “We’re going to give you a whole lot more free time.”

Robots are coming to take our jobs, drive our cars and do all kinds of things that we do right now, he says, including sophisticated procedures like surgeries.

Certainly, every repetitive, menial, dangerous job will be taken over by robots — and they should, says Holman.

Moreover, no one can stop this from happening because new inventions have been taking the place of human labour since the beginning of history.

Yet all these technological advances are merely aimed at meeting the lower rungs of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Starting from physical needs like food and sex, to security needs like employment and health, these are what Holman calls “quantity of life” issues.

But as we keep ascending Maslow’s pyramid to social needs like family ties and friendship, and onward to the need for esteem, it is harder to see how technology helps us to achieve that.

Then, Holman makes an important admission. At the highest tier of Maslow’s hierarchy, the need to achieve one’s full potential and to be creative, technology does not do the job.

This brings us to the crux of the current challenge.

“When you look around you, people are hurting,” says Holman.

“How do we take care of the inner life of humans? How do we take care of their psychological well-being? We haven’t solved that yet,” he says.

“I think that the important thing to understand is that all these technologies we are talking about are solving ‘quantity of life’ issues,” says Holman. “We have yet to solve quality of life issues, and I’m trying to tell you that from the frontlines.”

Then, Holman opens a window to the future with his parting line:

“What I’m hoping is that when a robot comes and takes your job, instead of going down kicking and screaming, you’ll join us in recognising that we need you to do what humans are uniquely good for, which is figure out how we’re going to take care of humans.”

Much promise is contained in this vision of a world driven by artificial intelligence. Once we realise like Holman that our evolution as a species is turning our focus towards our inner space, we will be ready to make innovation work for a more caring and connected world.

A good starting point may be to let go of the biological programming that our survival is always at stake. As Holman tells us, we have already won that game.

R B Bhattacharjee is associate editor at The Edge Malaysia

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