Extra Human (vs Super 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 AI Story
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 deployment. The market overwhelmingly rewards super human applications, which is why the current AI landscape is dominated by tools that accelerate productivity rather than tools that expand understanding.
Raskin's framework identifies extra human applications as the highest-value uses of AI precisely because they produce what the market underproduces. The Earth Species Project is an extra human application. Its output is not more work done faster — it is categories of understanding that did not previously exist. Similar applications exist or could exist in climate science, medicine, pedagogy, and governance, but each requires sustained investment in capabilities whose commercial returns are indirect and long-term.
Application to Segal's The Orange Pill is direct. Segal's celebration of AI productivity gains — the twenty-fold multiplier, the thirty-day product development, the imagination-to-artifact ratio approaching zero — is a celebration of super human applications. The expansions are genuine and impressive. They are also, in Raskin's framework, only half the story. The other half — what AI could do that humans alone cannot — is where Raskin locates the deepest promise of the technology.
The challenge for Raskin's position is that the extra human vision requires the same infrastructure — the same models, training data, computational resources, engineering talent — that the super human applications consume. The technology is dual-use not in the military sense but in the deeper sense that the same mathematical infrastructure serves both extraction and expansion. The design and the incentive structure, not the technology itself, determine which purpose prevails.
Origin
The distinction was articulated by Raskin in public talks and writings from approximately 2022 onward, gaining prominence through his 2023 TED talk on animal communication and his subsequent advocacy for redirecting AI development toward understanding rather than extraction.
Key Ideas
Acceleration vs expansion. Super human speeds up existing capability; extra human opens new capability.
Market asymmetry. Super human translates directly to revenue; extra human produces value the market underrewards.
Dual-use technology. The same infrastructure serves both directions; incentive structure determines which predominates.
The Earth Species example. Decoding animal communication as the paradigmatic extra human application and Raskin's working proof of concept.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- Aza Raskin, What if we could talk to animals? (TED, 2023)
- Douglas Engelbart, Augmenting Human Intellect (1962)
- Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, Power and Progress (2023)