Cultivating Human Potential

What if some of the potential we think we need to create is already there…

we just haven't learnt how to see it?

I think about people a lot.

Why we think the way we do.

Why two people can look at exactly the same thing and see something completely different.

Why some people seem to move comfortably through education, employment and technology while others struggle with systems that were never really designed around the way they think.

Why we are sometimes so quick to decide what another person is capable of.

And why, when something has been done a particular way for a very long time, we tend to assume that must be the way it should continue to be done.

I don't have answers to all of these questions.

In fact, the more I learn, the more questions I seem to have.

But over the past year, something has happened that has made me think about all of them much more deeply.

I discovered conversational artificial intelligence.

And, rather unexpectedly, I discovered quite a lot about myself.

A translator for the way I think

I have always had a lot going on in my head.

I think deeply about people and the future. I notice connections between things. One idea leads to another, which connects with something I've experienced, read or observed, which creates another question.

Sometimes I can see a much bigger picture forming long before I know how to explain it.

The difficult part has often been getting those thoughts out.

That isn't limited to writing.

It can happen when I speak too. I can know what I'm trying to communicate but struggle to find the right words or organise several connected thoughts into a neat sequence another person can easily follow.

I experience something similar in reverse.

Give me a large, dense block of writing and I can understand the individual words perfectly well, but sometimes struggle to identify what actually matters.

For most of my life, the expectation was that I adapt myself to the information.

Then I encountered something that could adapt the information to me.

I could give AI a wall of text and ask it to separate the information, organise it, pull out what mattered and present it differently.

Suddenly I could see the structure.

The information hadn't necessarily become intellectually easier.

It had become accessible to the way I process it.

And then I discovered that the translation worked in the opposite direction.

I could begin with an unfinished thought.

I could explain it badly.

I could jump between ideas.

I could start in completely the wrong place.

I could say, No. That's not what I mean.

And try again.

Through conversation, I could question, correct, rearrange and develop the thought until eventually I could see what I had been trying to explain.

The thought was there before I knew how to articulate it.

AI helped me translate it.

That distinction matters enormously to me.

I don't use AI because I have nothing to say.

Sometimes I use it because I have so much I want to say that I struggle to organise it into a form somebody else can understand.

And once I had a way of doing that, something else happened.

My thinking began going further.

What if the weakness isn't only a weakness?

For much of my life, I tended to judge the way my brain worked by the things I found difficult.

I don't naturally seem to think in a straight line.

My mind looks for connections.

One thought branches into another, then another. Sometimes I disappear quite a long way from where I started before eventually discovering that the ideas connect.

That isn't always convenient.

It can make communication difficult.

But I have started wondering whether the same characteristic that can create difficulties for me might also contribute to some of my strengths.

Perhaps the problem wasn't simply that my mind didn't always work particularly well in conventional structures.

Perhaps I had spent too much time asking what it didn't do well and not enough time asking:

What does it do differently?

That question has stayed with me.

Because surely this isn't only about me.

There must be people everywhere whose minds don't fit neatly into the structures we have built around education, employment and communication.

People who think visually.

People who see patterns.

People who make unusual connections.

People whose thoughts branch rather than travel neatly from A to B.

People who understand something intuitively but struggle to explain how they arrived there.

People who have spent years believing those differences were weaknesses because the environments around them rewarded a different kind of thinking.

And that makes me wonder:

How much human potential have we failed to recognise because we've been looking for it through too narrow a lens?

When the way we communicate affects the value of what we say

This question became more personal for me when I began developing a project of my own.

On paper, particularly with AI helping me organise my thoughts, I could explain complicated ideas relatively clearly.

But speaking spontaneously was different.

I had an experience where an idea seemed to be taken seriously before a conversation, but afterwards I came away wondering whether encountering the person behind the written words had changed something.

I don't know that it did.

I cannot know what somebody else was thinking, and I don't want to construct certainty where I don't have it.

But the experience left me with a question I haven't been able to shake.

Who do we recognise as having something worth saying?

There is professional expertise.

Academic expertise.

Technical expertise.

And there is lived experience.

Sometimes a person who doesn't speak the language of a system may notice something about that system precisely because they experience it from the outside.

That doesn't make their idea automatically right.

But surely the idea deserves to be considered on its merits.

Perhaps somebody who struggles to write the proposal has an extraordinary idea.

Perhaps somebody who cannot explain themselves beautifully in a meeting can see the problem more clearly than everyone else in the room.

Perhaps somebody without the expected qualification has noticed something the experts haven't.

Technology doesn't necessarily need to make those people more intelligent.

Perhaps it can make more of their intelligence visible.

Who gets to create?

This is one reason I find some of the judgement surrounding AI and creativity uncomfortable.

I understand many of the concerns.

Copyright matters.

Consent matters.

Attribution matters.

People's livelihoods matter.

Traditional skills and crafts deserve recognition.

There are difficult questions here, and pretending otherwise doesn't help anybody.

But I think there is another question sitting alongside them.

Who gets to participate?

Imagine somebody who has always had stories in their head but struggles profoundly with written language.

Someone with dyslexia.

Someone with a physical disability that makes traditional artistic tools difficult or impossible to use.

Someone who struggles with speech or written communication.

Someone whose brain simply processes information differently.

What happens when technology removes part of that barrier?

For the first time, perhaps they can show somebody else what they can see.

They can communicate an idea.

Create something.

Tell their story.

Participate.

Does the fact that they needed assistance automatically make what they produced less meaningful?

I don't think “They used AI” tells us nearly enough.

One person might enter a single instruction, accept the first response and present it without another thought.

Another might spend months questioning, researching, rejecting suggestions, correcting errors, restructuring, making decisions and developing the original idea.

Both can be reduced to the same three words:

They used AI.

But those are profoundly different human processes.

Perhaps we need to ask a better question.

Not simply:

Was AI used?

But:

How was it used?

What did the human contribute?

Did the technology replace the person's thinking?

Or did it help them express and extend it?

What thinking actually deserves our minds?

There is a legitimate concern that if technology does too much for us, human beings may stop thinking for themselves.

I share that concern.

I don't want AI replacing human judgement, curiosity, critical thinking, imagination or empathy.

But my own experience has made me wonder whether the question is more complicated.

Every day, we spend mental energy navigating systems.

Searching through menus.

Working out terminology.

Reformatting information.

Trying to determine which category our problem belongs in.

Correcting spelling.

Looking for information we know exists but cannot find.

For some people, particularly those with learning differences, disabilities, low literacy or limited digital confidence, that cognitive load can become a genuine barrier to participation.

So perhaps the question isn't simply:

How much thinking can AI do for us?

Perhaps it is:

What kinds of thinking should we offload — and what kinds should we cultivate?

I am quite comfortable allowing technology to help with some of the cognitive grunt work if that gives me more capacity to ask questions like:

What does this mean?

What does it connect to?

What am I missing?

How might somebody else see this?

What evidence contradicts what I currently believe?

What else could be true?

That isn't the absence of thinking.

For me, that is thinking.

Technology can give me information.

But I still have to decide which questions matter.

What I accept.

What I challenge.

What I reject.

What I want to understand better.

And sometimes — importantly — whether the evidence means I need to change my mind.

Access is not opportunity

There is another side to all of this that worries me enormously.

Inequality.

I believe AI could remove barriers for people who have previously been excluded.

But I also think it could accelerate existing inequalities remarkably quickly.

People who already have money, education, confidence, professional networks and good technology have enormous advantages.

They have time to experiment.

They can make mistakes.

They can learn how to ask better questions.

They can discover what these systems are capable of.

They can become increasingly skilled at using them.

Now think about somebody working long hours and raising children.

Someone struggling financially.

Someone who lacks confidence with computers.

Someone who struggled at school and has spent much of their life believing they aren't particularly intelligent.

An older person frightened they'll press the wrong button.

Someone with a learning difference who might benefit enormously from AI but doesn't have anyone beside them to show them what is possible.

Two people can have exactly the same application on exactly the same phone and have profoundly different access to what that technology can actually do for them.

One knows how to question it, challenge it, verify information, ask for another explanation and use it to extend their thinking.

The other doesn't know those possibilities exist.

Access is not the same thing as opportunity.

And because AI is moving into education, employment, business, creativity, communication, research and everyday decision-making, those differences can compound.

Someone learns faster.

That creates another opportunity.

They communicate more confidently.

Another advantage.

They recognise something they previously wouldn't have seen.

Another.

Meanwhile, some of the people who might benefit most from assistance may be hearing that using it is lazy, dishonest or evidence that they aren't capable.

We need to be careful.

If this technology really can help cultivate human potential, then surely one of the questions we need to ask is:

Whose potential are we cultivating?

Technology should adapt around people

All of this has changed the way I think about technology more broadly.

We have spent decades learning how to navigate machines.

Menus.

Forms.

Categories.

Passwords.

Terminology.

Processes.

Instructions.

But increasingly I find myself asking:

Why?

Why should somebody need to know which department is responsible for a broken streetlight before they can tell the council that the streetlight is broken?

Why should a person need to understand the terminology of a system before they can ask that system for help?

Why should somebody struggling with information have to navigate themselves around the information?

What happens when the information can begin adapting around the person instead?

That idea interests me enormously.

Not because I want machines to take over our decisions.

Quite the opposite.

I want technology to deal with more of the machinery underneath so that human beings have greater capacity for the things technology shouldn't decide for us.

What matters?

What is fair?

What do I believe?

What do you believe?

Why do we believe different things?

How do we understand one another?

And what kind of future do we want?

What else could be true?

The more I have explored these ideas, the less interested I have become in AI simply as a technology.

I am much more interested in what it reveals about people.

Who gets heard?

Who gets overlooked?

What do we recognise as intelligence?

What do we recognise as creativity?

How much does circumstance influence opportunity?

Why can two people encounter the same information and reach completely different conclusions?

How much of what we believe is genuinely ours, and how much have we absorbed from our families, communities, education, culture and experiences?

How quickly do we construct explanations for people whose lives we don't understand?

And how often do we stop to ask whether our first explanation might be wrong?

I have found myself returning increasingly to one very simple question:

What else could be true?

It doesn't mean that every possibility is equally likely.

It doesn't mean abandoning evidence.

And it certainly doesn't mean that truth doesn't matter.

For me, it means leaving enough room in my thinking to recognise that I may not yet have all the information.

That somebody else may know something I don't.

That my experience isn't everybody's experience.

And that changing my mind when I learn something new isn't a failure of thinking.

It is part of thinking.

Where might all of this lead?

Some of my questions have taken me considerably further than I expected.

I have even developed a theory about what human civilisation might look like hundreds — perhaps thousands — of years into the future if our ability to understand one another eventually becomes more sophisticated alongside our technological capability.

It may be completely wrong.

That's not really why it interests me.

What interests me is that I was able to follow the question far enough to develop the theory in the first place.

But that is a conversation for another day.

There are many conversations I want to have before then.

About inequality.

Education.

Technology.

Human judgement.

Opportunity.

Creativity.

Different ways of thinking.

Why we believe what we believe.

Why we find it so easy to understand people who are similar to us and sometimes so difficult to understand those who aren't.

And what might happen if we became a little more curious about the things we currently feel certain about.

I don't expect everyone to agree with me.

I don't expect to agree forever with everything I write today.

If I learn something tomorrow that changes what I believe, I hope I will have enough humility to change it.

I'm not interested in telling people what to think.

I'm interested in asking whether we are thinking deeply enough.

Because the thing that excites me most about our future isn't the possibility that machines might eventually have all the answers.

It's the possibility that better tools, better access, better questions and greater understanding might allow more human beings to discover what they are capable of.

There may be intelligence we haven't recognised.

Creativity we haven't enabled.

Perspectives we haven't heard.

Questions we haven't asked.

People whose potential has been hidden behind barriers we have mistaken for limitations.

And ideas none of us have thought of yet.

Perhaps cultivating human potential begins by becoming curious enough to look for it.