AI and the New Economics of Being Human
There is something wonderfully ironic happening in the great AI revolution. Just as we have built machines capable of doing an impressive amount of what highly educated humans have spent decades being paid to do, companies are suddenly willing to pay rather handsomely for people who can behave like humans.
EY is reportedly making $100 million available for bonuses for employees who demonstrate qualities such as critical thinking, communication and judgement, while KPMG and PwC are making similar moves. In other words, some of the world’s largest professional services firms, having invested heavily in artificial intelligence, have apparently discovered an exciting new technology called people.
I find this rather reassuring.
There is something wonderfully ironic happening in the great AI revolution. Just as we have built machines capable of doing an impressive amount of what highly educated humans have spent decades being paid to do, companies are suddenly willing to pay rather handsomely for people who can behave like humans.
EY is reportedly making $100 million available for bonuses for employees who demonstrate qualities such as critical thinking, communication and judgement, while KPMG and PwC are making similar moves. In other words, some of the world’s largest professional services firms, having invested heavily in artificial intelligence, have apparently discovered an exciting new technology called people.
Not because AI is harmless. Jobs will change. Some will disappear. There will be painful displacement, just as there has been during every substantial technological shift. But our obsession with asking what AI will take from us may be distracting us from the more interesting question: what will AI make more valuable about us?
I love AI. There, I’ve said it.
Perhaps it’s because I used to work in technology and therefore have a reasonably high tolerance for machines arriving and rearranging the furniture. But I also love it because it gets rid of an awful lot of drudgery. Nobody will gather their grandchildren around the fire and reminisce fondly about spending Tuesday afternoon formatting a document or summarising a meeting.
If a machine can do some of that for me, splendid.
The mistake is assuming that because AI can produce the work, it can necessarily do the job.
AI can generate a report. Someone still has to know whether the report is any good. It can produce ten ideas in seconds, but somebody must decide which one is worth pursuing. It can make a persuasive argument for something profoundly stupid because persuasion and wisdom have never been the same thing.
For years, organisations have rewarded people for precisely the things machines are becoming good at: producing more, responding faster, processing information and appearing relentlessly busy. We constructed workplaces around output and then became alarmed when technology learned how to generate output.
Perhaps our definition of valuable work was too narrow in the first place.
In my work with leaders, I am fascinated by the abilities that are hardest to put neatly into a competency framework. The manager who senses that the apparently difficult employee is actually overwhelmed. The person who notices the question nobody is asking. The colleague who can disagree without turning the meeting into a minor diplomatic incident.
These things look unimpressive on a spreadsheet.
Until they are missing.
AI may force us to understand the difference between intelligence and judgement. Intelligence processes information. Judgement decides whether it matters. Intelligence identifies patterns. Judgement recognises when this particular human situation might be the exception.
And as knowledge becomes extraordinarily cheap, knowing things becomes less distinctive. The premium shifts towards people who can learn, unlearn and adapt; people who can encounter new technology without either worshipping it or hiding underneath the desk.
The important divide in the workplace may not be between people who use AI and people who don’t. It may be between people who can adapt their thinking and people who remain attached to the way their value used to be created.
That matters because AI will not be the last disruption.
The real danger isn’t simply that people will use AI. It is that they will outsource their thinking to it. There is an enormous difference between asking AI to help you think and asking it to think instead of you.
I use it as a companion. It can organise messy thoughts, challenge an assumption, spot something I’ve overlooked and remove tedious steps between an idea and its execution. But I want my hands on the steering wheel. Not because I’m convinced I’m cleverer than the machine, some days there is insufficient evidence for that proposition, but because responsibility cannot be automated as easily as output.
Perhaps this is what those bonuses really tell us. Technology is changing the economics of being human.
When machines can produce competent work cheaply and quickly, competence alone becomes less distinctive. The premium moves towards discernment, imagination, relationships, trust, curiosity and that peculiar combination of experience and instinct that allows one person to look at exactly the same information as everyone else and see something different.
There is a delicious paradox here. The more sophisticated artificial intelligence becomes, the less impressive it is to behave like a machine.
The Industrial Revolution didn’t make human beings obsolete. It changed where human value sat. The transition was painful, and AI deserves the same seriousness. Leaders, employers and governments cannot simply pocket the productivity gains and leave individuals to absorb the disruption under the cheerful instruction to ‘adapt’.
But neither should concern become fatalism.
Human beings have an extraordinary history of inventing tools that make certain human activities unnecessary and then discovering entirely new things for humans to do. We are irritatingly adaptable creatures.
The organisations that thrive won’t simply be those with the most AI, nor those clinging fiercely to the old ways. They will be the ones intelligent enough to know what should be handed to the machine and what must remain stubbornly, gloriously human.
So I am less interested in whether AI can do my job than I am in what remains when it does the boring parts of it.
Perhaps the machine isn’t coming to replace the human after all.
Perhaps it is finally forcing us to decide what the human was there for.
P.S. If you are leader worried about how AI is impacting your job or want to me to come and speak to your workforce to calm them down about AI, let’s chat here.