In Response to Those Wonderful People Who Brought Us "Chatbots"
We can surpass Artificial Intelligence with emotional intelligence.
“I was really happy to get a chatbot instead of a human being when I called in to cancel my cable TV service,” said no one ever.
Recently, purely out of curiosity, I asked Grok, “As artificial intelligence increases, what is the best strategy for a person with strong people skills?”
Its answer was not surprising:
“As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to advance, jobs requiring strong interpersonal skills remain highly valuable, as AI struggles to replicate the emotional intelligence, empathy, and nuanced communication humans excel at. For someone with strong people skills, the best job strategy involves leveraging these uniquely human strengths in roles that complement AI rather than compete with it.”
Let us overlook the fact that the grammar police would wince at the above paragraph and instead consider where the AI response is heading.
Grok’s examples of the human strengths were:
Leadership and management roles that involve “motivating teams, resolving conflicts, and fostering culture.”
“High-touch sales, client relationship management, and customer success roles” that “depend on trust-building and understanding client needs.”
Therapists, life coaches, career advisors, teachers, trainers, nurses, social workers, and patient advocates. Jobs involving negotiation skills, data interpretation, ethics, and problem-solving were also on the “complementary to AI” list.
My initial reaction? When AI says that it is struggling “to replicate” a skill that humans excel at, that is not the same as saying that AI is regarding such skills as forbidden territory.
There is a “give us some more time and we’ll catch up” slant to that response.
The good news, however, is that the subtle aspects of human interactions, the intuitive realm, may remain beyond the reach of AI for a very long time, if not forever.
The bad news is that the isolation of social media has been thwarting the development of conversational and people skills by many young people who would rather text message than talk to another person. It is as if they have been learning to be machines.
And if you act like a machine, you can be replaced by a machine.
An alarm bell is ringing. Now is an ideal time for people who want to be economically viable to increase their emotional intelligence. Particular attention should be given to those very fine points where experience and knowledge combine to produce intuition; the sort of instinct that helps the quarterback decide whether to run or to pass or the executive to sense when someone across the bargaining table cannot be trusted or to spot when someone wanted to speak up but became oddly silent.
Many, if not most, of us have seen cases where the best decision is not reached by adding up components but by understanding the blank spaces between those components; an understanding, a sixth sense, that is refined by both study and experience.
We know there is a big difference between reading an account of a meeting and being in the meeting.
In summary, many of the human jobs of the future will involve translating humans for AI and AI for humans. Such skills are likely to be in demand for a long time.
But in order to secure those jobs, we’ll need more human contact, more face-to-face communication, skillful listening for what was meant and not just what was said, and, in essence, more work at being human.
And that’s good, because being human – genuinely human – is an area in which we have a monopoly.