AI tools may one day be better than any human at many things. It’s possible an AI system could become a better writer, artist and coder. The popular narrative is that humans will always dominate in roles where empathy, collaboration, and social interaction are important. We encourage people to spend more time on soft skills, collaboration and communication.
What if this isn’t true? In some settings, humans are reliant on AI tools for therapy and connection. Some humans prefer the company of animals to that of other humans. It seems reasonable that there will be a future where some humans prefer the company of robots to humans. We can already see signs of this through the dark-mirror-esque recent story from Wired about the wives of Silicon Valley founders. And all the reports of people seeking advice from chatbots rather than doctors or mental health professionals.
I can imagine a future where many people prefer a non-human system for many things that today we rely on humans for. We accept non-human decision-making in a wide range of industries and experiences today. Yet, just because AI systems and tools can do one or many things that humans do today better tomorrow, doesn’t automatically mean that humans will have no work to do. That is a false equivalence. There are an almost infinite number of possible futures where humans and automated systems work in different, varied ways.
Humans will remain relevant with or without AI tools because we employ people mainly to work with people, not to do mindless, automatable tasks. The majority of time in a typical job isn’t especially productive. People chat over coffee, handle personal matters, speak with customers, suppliers and partners and sit in endless meetings about things they should or could or might be doing. Productive, deep work does happen for most people, yet it’s often done around the other messy-humans-working-with-humans work. Even if you get a perfect answer every time, who’s going to build it with you? Once you have optimised your time beyond a certain point, there isn’t any more flex. We all need other people to get anything meaningful done.
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Chatting with LLMs, chatbots, and agent tools can be interesting and fun, but it is also superficial. The longer someone chats with a chatbot, the more endearing the complexity of a human conversation becomes. Only humans can do many things with other humans. Only a human can have deep technical knowledge about a topic, have experienced that domain, and sit down to talk with you about their kids, their hobbies and complex problems. Only humans can create art that has a human story behind it. AI systems will certainly write amazing stories and generate spectacular art. But once it’s prolific, it’s worthless. We value things made by humans because of their scarcity, personality and story.
This is obvious to students and the majority of people who are increasingly negative about AI, yet it seems invisible to many leaders. I suspect this is because of the distance abstraction creates. Leaders of companies abstract themselves from the front-line work. Even a mid-sized company is simply too large to keep track of everything. Sometimes by choice or personality, managers increasingly abstract their connections with work and people. “It’s lonely at the top,” as the saying goes. All the potential possibility of AI systems fits nicely into this simplified abstraction. The messy, unproductive part of work doesn’t fit well in burndown charts, productivity metrics and token consumption. AI tools offer the illusion of a simple, abstracted solution. The popular narrative at the top is some version of “we can carry on as-is, don’t worry, everything will be amazing with AI.”
Like previous similar cycles of technology transformation and corporate profiteering, we will see a lot more damage before things improve. A lot of people will lose their jobs and suffer due to shortsighted, distant management. After a time, those companies will hire people back once they realise that all that human-to-human inefficiency isn’t easily replaced with a probabilistic, generative system. Or when, more carefully, quiet companies step up and fill the gaps. Eventually, the delusional returns will not materialise, and high-risk, high-return investors will pull back and look for something else to gamble on.
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The impact on knowledge workers will be terrible and cyclical. And while we are all distracted by this AI illusion, development funding cuts, war, environmental disasters, and global warming are taking away the futures of the children of the world. For the majority of workers, they will continue to do what they have always done, make the best of things in spite of clueless management. All of us will continue to make the best of the tools we are given, as we have done with ERPs, cloud computing and every iteration of the technology transformation eras. We aren’t going through an AI, cognitive boom. We are going through a social, political, and moral crisis. Developed economies have lost their way, established tech companies don’t know how to further juice their returns, and AI is the newest appealing distraction from real problems without easy solutions.
Humans won’t be replaced by robots or AI systems. It’s frustrating that we even need to debate this point. The debate alone shows us how far the social narrative has abstracted away from the reality of how our world works. The world is full of jagged edges that don’t fit in rapid-prototype-iteration cycles. AI tools are just another technology transformation trend. Like previous tech tools, they are amazing and offer lots of exciting new possibilities. And they are distracting us from the things that are harming humanity.
We cannot drink tokens, eat GPUs, live in data centres, or resolve wars with chatbots. The majority of the world is happening outside of the AI-obsessed global north. We used to chide each other about “the world happening outside our window,” yet now we are told to obsess over the world running on our phones and in our heads. Humans tire easily, and I expect we will soon tire of the obsession with superficial AI-enabled commerce.
Even a perfect AI system will be boring at a coffee table. We love to complain about each other and will go to great lengths to avoid interactions with each other. Yet we also love each other and find ways to care and support each other in so many ways. There is so much beauty and love in humanity. We don’t need AI to replace us if we just stop and look for a moment at what we have created, both the beauty and the horror.
We can imagine a better future for all of us with all kinds of technologies if we first invest in each other and the world outside of ourselves.
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