Although getting the right answer, or answers, to this question is somewhere between difficult and impossible, and therefore a task undertaken only by the wise and brave, or by the ignorant and foolish, it is perhaps somewhat easier to identify what the answer, or answers, are not — to discern which answers are wrong.
Yet this approach has the defect of leaving one in the position of being labeled as purely negative: the armchair critic.
So perhaps a moderate approach to this question would be to do a little of both: to rightly discover the weaknesses in proposed answers, and to point to possible components of correct answers, without claiming to have precisely, exhaustively, and finally identified the correct answer or answers.
As a point of departure, Marc Benioff asserts that human nature is malleable, mutable, and changeable. He writes that not only is human nature capable of being changed, but rather also that it is in fact being altered:
The convergence of digital technologies with breakthroughs in materials science and biology means that we are seeing the emergence of entirely new ways in which to live. In both subtle and explicit ways, technology is changing what it means to be human.
There are reasons to question Benioff’s proposition that human nature can be altered. First, he asserts that “technology” is changing human nature; yet technology is a product of human nature. Any technology which acts upon humans is merely an extension of humanity itself.
In some science-fiction scenario where robot overlords, or AI run amok, or genetic engineering influences human beings, that is merely humans shaping themselves. To have an effect on one’s self — as in, the entirety of humanity having an effect on itself — is substantially different than being changed or altered by some external force.
If humanity acts upon itself, it will not change human nature, but rather merely be a working out, an extension, of what humanity is.
Technology can and does change a great deal about the world, and this is easily seen. But to say that it changes human nature is a different matter.
Benioff’s concept is essentially structured in the passive voice: “what it means to be human” is being changed by technology. If human nature can be changed by technology, then technology is in some sense superior to, or higher than, or dominant over, human nature. Yet technology is a product of, an extension of, human nature, and is therefore less than, or at most equal to, human nature.
Thus understood, Marc Benioff is partly correct and partly wrong when he writes:
In the coming decades, the technologies driving the fourth industrial revolution will fundamentally transform the entire structure of the world economy, our communities and our human identities.
To say that technology will change the economy, communities, and human identity is, respectively, correct, debatable, and wrong.
“The world economy” consists of what people value, how that value is produced, how it changes over time, how trades and exchanges are made, how local variables influence global patterns of valuation and exchange, etc. — All of which points to the malleability of economies. Indeed, a reasonable argument could be made for the hypothesis that economies are by nature changing and not static.
“Communities” are collections of humans who interact with each other on a frequent enough and significant enough level to create a communal identity in addition to the identity of each individual who is part of that community. In the first quarter of the twenty-first century, the word ‘community’ has been abused and misused to the extent that it needs some clarification. For example, there is talk of the “African-American community” or the “Latino / Hispanic community” or other alleged communities. But to assert that every African-American is part of some community, or that every Latino / Hispanic is part of some community, is to assert that a university-educated African-American millionaire on Wall Street is in community with an impoverished African-American farmer in rural Arkansas and with a blue-collar African-American in inner-city Chicago. It is to assert that a Latino professor of physics at the University of Michigan is in community with a Hispanic shop owner who operates a small business in Los Angeles. This is a thorough misunderstanding of what community is: community is more than a statistical sharing of only one of hundreds of demographic variables.
Before deciding whether, how, or to which extent human communities are mutable, it must first be determined what community is: a usable definition for the word ‘community’ must be found.
Human identity, on the other hand, is clearly non-malleable. One either is, or is not, human; and if one is human, then a change in “our human identities” would entail that some individuals would cease to be human if they met the criteria for the old version of humanity but not for the new version, and that, likewise, other individuals who were previously not human would become human through this “transforming” of human identity. Benioff’s assertion leads inexorably to some conclusions which even he himself might not desire.
Klaus Schwab echoes Benioff’s proposition:
Of the many diverse and fascinating challenges we face today, the most intense and important is how to understand and shape the new technology revolution, which entails nothing less than a transformation of humankind.
After an examination of Benioff’s and Schwab’s assertions about human nature — those assertions amount largely to the assertion of pliability — the task remains to make positive postulations about human nature: hypothesizing without going “a bridge too far” and claiming to have made a final and ultimate definition of human nature.
Therefore, the following are to be understood as suggestions — as indications about a possible path to a definition of humanity — and not as an exhaustive declaration of “what it means to be human.”
First, humans are rational, knowing, deliberate agents. A debt to the general trend of Lockean thought is evident here. Humans are rational: the powers of reasoning and logic are universal among human beings, even if the development and degree of that characteristic varies from one individual to another — 7 + 5 = 12 is a universal human truth. Humans know: they possess knowledge and information. Humans deliberate: the application of rationality to knowledge is part of deliberation, but there is more to deliberation than that: a teleology — deliberation calculates about a goal, or a set of goals, and how to reach those goals, and how to understand the possible tradeoffs between multiple dearly-held goals. Humans are agents: after reasoning, knowing, and deliberating, humans act. Thus described, human nature is immutable, and has not changed in all of recorded history — whether that be reckoned as 6,000 years or 10,000 years or some other number. It is not possible, nor even conceivable, that it should change.
Second, human nature is essentially imperfect and broken. Rationally, humans are liable to error in their deliberations. Cognitively, humans are liable to misunderstanding and misremembering. Morally, humans are liable to wrongdoing, to evil, to sin. Collectively, this is understood as “fallenness” or weakness — or, in the broader sense, mortality.
Third, humans have passion. Love and hate, sadness and joy — emotions are essentially human, despite the occasional attribution and misattribution of such to animals, and humans are essentially emotional.
Fourth, humans are communal. Aristotle’s comment on this is frequently quoted and as frequently misunderstood. Humans are innately social. Wittgenstein went so far as to write that language’s ability to have meaning is based on humanity’s social nature. Admittedly, humans can live in isolation: Defoe’s novel shows this, as does Mary Shelley’s less-known novel, The Last Man. The ability of humans to survive alone does not contradict the thesis that humans are intrinsically social.
No claim is here made that the above four assertions together constitute a complete or comprehensive definition of humanity. Rather, they are at best hints toward a rough working draft of such a definition. It is, however, plausible that the four qualities listed above are inherent, immutable, and immalleable, and that therefore, despite a changing context, human nature does not change.
