As promised, here is the continuation of the last post.
If you didn’t read it, that one talks about the advantages that AI tools have over us.
Now it’s our turn.
Here are the areas where we excel -
Learning from experience
- While AI tools can learn from existing data, we can have new experiences at any time and learn new things from them.
Experiencing emotions
- We have a wide array of positive emotions that machines lack. Things like empathy, curiosity, intuition, “gut-feelings”. They can all create new experiences and angles to things which makes them valuable.
Creativity/Abstraction
- We can “think outside the box”. If the ideas are good enough then they can expand that metaphorical box or create new boxes. AI tools can learn about them after the fact, but it’s humans that do the heavy lifting on this one.
Physicality and senses
- Some aspects of our biologies can be negative (as mentioned in the last post), but some can also be huge advantages. We can move through the world (we aren’t stuck in a cold server room). We have different senses that we can use to experience things (yes, machines can have sensors, but can they really taste anything?).
Adaptable to new situations
- We don’t have to only do what we are programmed to do.
Ability to think
- AI tools can simulate thinking but can they really “think”. Not the way that we do. It combines some of the things mentioned above, but I think that thinking (ha) deserves to be mentioned separately. It’s that important.
Soft Skills/Human Skills
- I appreciate that Simon Sinek calls soft skills “human skills” so I started calling them that as well. These are things like having difficult conversations, professionally disagreeing, conflict management, leadership, teamwork. This list could get out of control quickly so I’ll stop there.
Creative problem solving
- We have so many ways to approach problems like using critical thinking, analytical thinking, and approaches that don’t have a name because we make it up as we go (creatively).
If you are worried about AI tools taking your job, the good news is that you can double down on the areas where we have an advantage.
I don’t know if it’s true, but I heard an interesting thing about AI - AI developers could run out of high-quality data to train AI models in the next 2 - 3 years which might plateau AI performance.
So again, double down on human skills.