Humans have an extraordinary capacity to adapt to the environment. We create cultures and we exist within them. Our capacity for culture—our ability to create and share knowledge, insights and wisdom—is the human superpower. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an extension of our adaptability and sharing and quest for knowledge.

Because of culture, humans can live in more variable environments than perhaps any other animal apart from tardigrades (also known as ‘little water bears’).

The human race can also be defined by an ongoing flux of migration and conflict. For the past 200,000 years, we have been on a phenomenal, rapidly accelerating journey to every corner of the globe.

From 100,000 BC to 10,000 BC the global human population remained relatively stable at about 1 million. The primary reason for this relative stability was the Ice Age, a supercritical period in the development of the modern human. The difficult conditions probably spurred our capacity to reflect deeply and plan ahead.

Phenomenal Growth

Around 10,000 BC, several branches of humanity began clustering into larger groups, forming some of the earliest civilisations (where ‘civilisation’ denotes such things as agriculture and livestock, settlement, urbanisation and written language). The Neolithic Revolution (or First Agriculture Revolution) sparked the population growth we’ve experienced ever since. The Industrial Revolution added impetus to this rise.

It took us about 12,000 years to reach 1 billion people in 1804.

It took another 123 years for the human population to double to 2 billion in 1927.

We became 3 billion in 1960, 4 billion in 1974, 5 billion in 1987 and in 2022 we reached 8 billion.

In fewer than 100 years we’ve quadrupled.

Decline of Peace

Let’s take a step back to 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell. Political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously declared this moment ‘the end of history’—a world moving from barriers to unity, from division to connection.

That same year, Tim Berners-Lee gave us the internet, and economic globalisation surged. Time and space compressed. Suddenly, billions of people had the world’s knowledge at their fingertips. Surely, this would bring us together.

But what happened instead? Within three decades, the world experienced massive economic globalisation without globalisation of values and ethics.

By 2008, social media had exploded into the world. Social media encased people within echo chambers. According to the Global Peace Index, peace has been steadily declining since the rise of social media. Is there a correlation? I think so.

The global cost of conflict that has a cultural dimension equates to more than $US 14 trillion, not including the cost of gender and ethnic or disability inequality or exclusion, or the cost of conflict within organisations.

Combined, the cost of conflict with a cultural dimension and the cost of exclusion these days far exceeds $US 20 trillion a year, amounting to more than 20% of global GDP.

Unintended Effects of DEI

On 20 May 2020, African American man George Floyd was murdered by a policeman, on camera in broad daylight. Suddenly, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) came under intense scrutiny. The term DEI represents an industry dedicated to transforming workplaces. DEI initiatives aim to address longstanding gaps in gender, racial, disability and sexuality equality, and all areas where workplace practices have lagged behind legislative and societal progress.

Before long, it seemed like everyone was calling themselves a DEI officer.

With all this momentum, one might have expected polarisation to be addressed. Yet here we are.

Social media exploits a biological survival mechanism that has evolved in us over the last 200,000 years. FEAR. And it’s also big business. Algorithms are designed to keep us in echo chambers—not to liberate us, but to shackle us.

Combine this with the well-intended but overly simplistic social justice frameworks that perpetuate problematic racial categories and that DEI has widely embraced, and what do we get? A world where our identities are flattened into one or two attributes and rigidly defined, sometimes by ourselves and often by others. Yet, as humans, we are extraordinarily complex.

Can AI Solve Our Challenges?

ChatGPT attracted a million users in just 5 days after going public on 30 November 2022. Now it has more than 400 million weekly active users. This indicates the phenomenal speed and change we’re experiencing.

Can AI solve the challenges of globalisation: the intercultural misunderstandings and exclusions that are costing us so much in terms of human happiness and dollars?

In the Terminator movies, we saw how the Terminator became more than human and in turn became glorified. Was this fictitious or a prophetic account of the seemingly inescapable world of AI and how it will change us?

One thing is clear—technology is big business. Once upon a time, the largest industries in the world were resource extraction and big pharmaceuticals. But today, the five tech giants known as GAMMA—Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Apple—dwarf the global mining industry, which in 2025 has a $US 1.7 trillion market capitalisation and the global pharmaceutical industry, which in 2025 just tops a $US 16 trillion market cap.

Collectively, in 2025 the five tech giants hold a market cap of almost $US 7 trillion. This figure is likely to balloon in the years to come.

With the advent of AI and its Large Language Models (LLMs), we see another challenge emerging. Most AI is making the assumption that we are all starting from the same social and cultural place. But we’re not.

As I reflect on all this, I can’t help but ask:
Technology is designed as an enabler, built by humans—but are we centring humans in its development? In other words: Are we paying enough attention to the relationship between culture and AI—the effect each has on the other?

If not, where will that take us?

The content in this post was based on two panel sessions ‘AI—Terminator or Liberator?’ and ‘Technology in an Age of Polarisation’, moderated by the author at Big Data & AI World, London, March 2025.

People in the photo, from left to right: Rosangela de Jesus das Neves, Peter Mousaferiadis, Catherine Wright, Alvine Tremoulet, Gold Darr Hood, Kasia Hayward, Amri B. Johnson