“We need to get back to doing what we actually do best: being human!”
(Richard Seidl)
No, not another article about AI. Or maybe it is? A little? Or not at all? Well, humans are highly ambivalent creatures, tangled up in contradictions day in, day out. We don’t say what we think. We don’t do what we say. We spend half the day thinking about some stuff or other and keep changing our minds. To borrow loosely from Konrad Adenauer: “What do I care about my chatter from yesterday? Nothing stops me from becoming wiser.” We may dislike this inconsistency in ourselves and in others, but it is what makes us who we are!
When it comes to empathy and AI, the balance is clear: empathy and self-awareness are our core competence, and AI can’t reach them yet. If AI takes work off our hands, that is exactly what we should use the time we gain for.
The Promise of Less Work
Industrialization, robotics, computer science: all of them promised us that, used the right way, they would automate many of our tasks and leave us more time for the good things in life. But when I look at today’s world of work, I have my doubts that this promise was kept. I see overtime, burnout, dull daily routines and crises of meaning far more often than people reading a book under a walnut tree half the day. Fine, there are surely other factors at play. But will AI change that? Here, too, comes the promise of finally having a smart digital personal assistant that does and organizes everything for you. One that builds texts, articles, even entire websites, while we finally sit down under the walnut tree with a good book. Well, I don’t buy it yet. I do believe the potential is there now. But we aren’t the kind of people who will use it that way. So the result won’t be more free time and freedom, but more stress.
A Space of Possibilities
As always with new technology, it beats us in some particular area. And yes, that means there will be new jobs, and it will cost us a few old ones. Search engine text optimizers, for example, who adapt texts for the web so the right keywords sit in the right places. Not too often, not too rarely. With the right paragraph and sentence lengths. None of that is about giving readers more exciting content; it is about feeding the algorithms of Google & Co. so the page ranks as high as possible. The information value comes second. AI is good at that kind of thing, and as long as anyone still needs it, AI is welcome to do it. And what about the rest? A journalist who uses AI to help with writing can put more time into research, investigation and contact with people. A doctor who gets more information faster thanks to AI can diagnose more precisely and spend more time talking with patients. You see where I’m going with this? Once again we have the chance to use technology sensibly to be what we are: human beings, relational beings.
Empathy: What AI Can’t Reach Yet
The German Wikipedia says: “Empathy is the ability and willingness to recognize, understand and share the sensations, emotions, thoughts, motives and personality traits of another person.” And further: “The basis of empathy is self-awareness; the more open a person is to their own emotions, the better they can read the feelings of others.” Self-awareness and putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. We have been training ourselves out of both for quite some time. A fatal mistake, I think. Because alongside our contradictions, our mistakes and all our other imperfections, it is precisely these two things that make us human. And AI can’t reach them yet, if it ever will. That is our trump card!
In that spirit, I wish you and your team more empathy and humanity, and fewer auto-generated texts 😉
