CONCEPT
Extra Human (vs Super Human)
Raskin's distinction between technology that accelerates what humans already do (super human) and technology that expands what it means to be human (extra human).
Extra human names Raskin's preferred direction for AI development — the expansion of what humans can perceive, understand, and connect with rather than the acceleration of what they already do. The distinction from super human is precise. Super human applications optimize existing dimensions of human activity: more productive, more efficient, more capable at tasks humans already perform. Extra human applications open new dimensions: discovering patterns in whale communication that human perception cannot detect, revealing structural relationships across disciplines that no single mind could traverse, enabling conversations with the nonhuman world that previously did not seem possible.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The distinction is not merely rhetorical. It generates different design decisions and different commercial incentives. Super human applications translate directly to economic value: more code, more features, more products, more revenue. Extra human applications do not translate as cleanly, because the value of understanding whale communication or decoding crow vocalizations is not captured by the productivity metrics that drive investment and