Diving into the way humans function there is an extraordinarily complex and beautiful system to discover. Nevertheless, it maybe isn’t the one people would love to have.

Given the life most of us can live, there is an implicit hope, that as we are basically safe, we could focus on becoming better at whatever we’d choose. The result then becomes the ability to be a performant human being. Interestingly it also is a belief that fits the concept of the survival of the fittest! A concept that is fundamentally linked to humans living in an environment that is dangerous as only the fittest are seen as able to survive.

Slowly but surely, the idea of the survival of the fittest continues to adapt itself to the world we live in. Less, nowadays, because of survival as such. In fact, survival seems to have gained a new meaning. In the past what was at stake was to win the game of survival. Today that game has established itself in a different type of competition, probably the one called “performance.”

There probably never has been a single competence, strength, or ability that allowed us to win the competition of life. A diversity that remains present today, however with a different focus.

But the idea of performance now has become one’s ability to take up new competencies as they appear. The latest of them is the ability to use AI to some advantage.

The people who don’t join in on that conversation and development of competence quickly experience themselves as outsiders. A way to still belong is to become someone who discusses its dangers. However, that is also very much about resisting change and even more so the felt necessity to keep up with yet another “performance.”

It’s a tension between those who can impact the rules and those who only feel subject to them.

Fittest might thus have changed to now mean “powerful.”