Seven centuries of Renaissance from Florence to ChatGPT
In a cultural and intellectual melting pot called Florence, which provided the world with an explosion of knowledge, creativity, and new possibilities, figures such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Filippo Brunelleschi, Andrea Vesalius, Galileo Galilei, Dante Alighieri or Nicolaus Machiavelli led a series of discoveries in the arts, sciences, astronomy, literature, anatomy, philosophy or politics.
Seven centuries later, the generous investments, the rivalries and strategic alliances, the powerful families and patrons are other than the Medici or the Pazzi. The resources and tools to learn and hone skills and competencies, and to project cities and nations on the international stage, are no longer within the reach of just a few. The Renaissance of human potential is today being driven by a Generative Artificial Intelligence that is more accessible, efficient and reliable than its predecessors.
As humanity, we are (re)living a unique creative effervescence environment again, with unprecedented levels of technological excellence and democratization of knowledge. With a different kind of artistic splendor and technical mastery, to be sure. Different intersections of disciplines to drive the progress and challenges that move the world forward now. But clearly, and as bestselling author Brian Tracy put it, “This is a wonderful time to be alive. There have never been more possibilities and opportunities for you to achieve more of your goals than exist today´”.
Working in Marketing, for example, is to welcome ChatGPT, Deepl, Bard, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, Synthesia, or Genio, among many other platforms powered by Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Generative AI. Even Leonardo da Vinci believed that to fully understand something or a task, you needed to see it from at least three different perspectives. This is what these new “colleagues” help us do: get original suggestions for slogans, translate content automatically, expand the range of available arguments, stimulate our creativity for brainstorming and problem-solving, generate videos from ideas, or build complex information systems from models, drinking from an unparalleled source of knowledge that transcends the limitations of the brightest human minds.
It is time to bring back what Frans Johansson called the “Medici Effect” in his book of the same title. It is time to rediscover and give new meaning to the classics, to invert the premises, to reframe the way we think about ourselves, the world, work, and knowledge. It is time to be reborn to new ways of learning without memorizing, of embracing virtual reality and not just imagining it, of not fearing robotics or wasting human talent on tasks that do not dignify ourselves, of sculpting with 3D printing and not just with our hands, of developing digital solutions without having to write a single line of code.
A new season of true teams of geniuses is open and diverse in the human and artificial intelligence they combine, and in the thematic and spatiotemporal boundaries they break down. They are global in their ability to decompartmentalize disciplines, languages, genders, ages, cultures, businesses, and experiences – and exponentially productive in automating 60% to 70% of the activities that make up their working time, generating between 2.6 and 4.4 billion dollars in annual productivity, as calculated by Mckinsey & Company in a recent study.
The visionary legacy of those who challenged geocentrism, ethnocentrism, and other dominant isms in the 15th and 16th centuries inspires us to continue this interdisciplinary journey of polymathy, which innovates from unlikely connections and is daily responsible for the creation and disruption of millions of professions (and solutions) that rely on new super-smart technological allies.
It took us 5,000 years to go from the invention of writing to the printing press, and 500 years to go from the printing press to email, but it only took the blink of an eye of two months to put more than 100 million people on a daily basis using a chatbot that writes, interacts, processes information and responds to challenges faster and often better than a human being. The renaissance from the life and profession we were accustomed to seems to me, therefore, the minimum expected of us as humanity, from now on.
*This article was originally published on Marketeer.