Why is ‘enablement’ as a way of thinking so important to people in today’s society?

To understand this, we need to appreciate the term ‘enablement’. Enablement means strengthening, giving confidence, capacity building, and giving the means for accomplishing a task.

Enablement can be seen to have 4 building blocks:

Enablement means that human beings are better able to perform work (as compared to making them redundant and therefore incapable of accomplishing that goal by themselves). Enablement in this sense, is antithetical to the idea of doing without people – automation or making people redundant or irrelevant to the task.

In today’s society, every major advancement in making lives convenient, reducing effort in certain directions, reducing the role of human labour, must be accompanied by an equal advancement in enablement – giving people the capacity to use new tools, giving people new capacities and new opportunities to leverage their personal possibilities as individuals, and giving people a new vision of their roles in society – in their homes, colleges, factories, services, etc.

Modern society must therefore be seen as a DNA.

Without automation, we would not be able to free humans to realize their possibilities. Without enablement, we may leave human beings with comfort, but not fulfilment and accomplishment.  

This vision takes on a special importance in our understanding and leveraging of AI. AI should be conceptualized as a mechanism for enablement rather than as a tool of automation alone. This allows us to design new ‘knowledge-enablement’ or ‘capacity-enablement’ applications that can radically upgrade our standards of personal productivity and work excellence in the years to come.