Unlocking Success in the Era of AI & Robotics: The Human Advantage

Hello Ignore the Confusion readers! How are you?

It’s been a while since my last post. I’ve been busy building our VC firm, supporting our IP strategy and software clients, and teaching/mentoring grad students from the Fung Institute and Haas at UC Berkeley. Needless to say it’s been a busy time, but not too busy to keep writing. Here’s a short piece on AI, the future of work, and embracing our ‘human advantage’ to succeed in the job market.

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We are living in interesting times. Everywhere I look, I see articles and discussions about the potential for massive upheavals that will emanate from artificial intelligence and robotic automation. As I reflect on this, it is apparent that not only my students at UC Berkeley but perhaps even more strikingly, my own children will likely encounter a job market unlike anything previous generations have witnessed. In light of this rapidly changing environment, at the end of this essay, I offer some advice on skills to cultivate in order to navigate this future dominated by machines.

Recently, a close colleague shared a thought-provoking substack post, Centaurs and Cyborgs on the Jagged Frontier by Ethan Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School of Business. Mollick, who is trying to “understand what our new AI-haunted era means for work and education”, collaborated with several other scholars to publish a working paper to understand the “Effects of AI on Knowledge Worker Productivity and Quality”.

I strongly recommend reading both the paper and Mollick’s substack post. For me, two key conclusions in the substack post stood out. The first revolves around real-world tests that Mollick and colleagues performed on job recruiters who were given high-quality AI tools to enhance their performance. The researchers discovered that these recruiters became “lazy, careless, and less skilled in their own judgment”.  Mollick concludes, "When the AI is very good, humans have no reason to work hard and pay attention".

Considering the fact that AI tools are improving rapidly, Mollick and his team’s findings are quite concerning. As humans increasingly rely on AI to help support their work, be it in HR recruitment, college admissions, teaching, or even legal proceedings, it isn’t difficult to imagine a scenario where many individuals disengage and lose interest.  Even without AI, many of us are already inundated with distractions from our social media feeds, 24-hour news cycles, and endless entertainment options.

Building on this finding, the authors go on to describe how AI acts as a “skill leveler”. In short, when conducting AI experiments involving management consultants, those who scored poorly in pre-experiment assessments showed the most significant improvement in their performance when aided by AI. While the consultants who scored highest in their pre-experiment assessment also benefited from AI, their improvement was much less pronounced. Mollick notes, "Looking at these results, I do not think enough people are considering what it means when a technology raises all workers to the top tiers of performance."

This conclusion raises intriguing questions. If AI can elevate all knowledge workers, regardless of their initial skill levels to top tier performance, what happens to work ethic and competition? If individuals can achieve similar results with less effort thanks to an AI assistant, what motivates them to put in the hard work, pursue a top-tier education, or even get out of bed each day?

To be clear, the AI phenomenon is likely to yield many unforeseen consequences that are difficult to predict. Nevertheless, at the very least, this research highlights the uncertainty surrounding education, work, and human motivation in the future. Furthermore, while it's difficult to speculate on how the future will unfold, an excerpt from this Ezra Klein podcast interview of Melanie Challenger, offers some interesting insight into how embracing our humanity might be our only hope in a world increasingly dominated by machines.

Animals, Machines, & Pseudo Machines:

Challenger and Klein discuss the intriguing paradox brought about by the rapid progress of AI and human-engineered robotic machines. This paradox becomes all the more complex when considering that our human identity has long been defined by our 'superior' cognitive intelligence, particularly in contrast to other animal species. This exploration sparks questions about our ethical treatment of animals and the impending implications as machines continue to surpass our cognitive capacities. It challenges us to reconsider our place in a future where the boundaries between humans and machines blur, and the moral landscape of how we treat others, both sentient and artificial, is reshaped. The episode delves deep into the questions, “what does it mean to be human in a world where we are no longer superior by the standards we’ve created?”, and, “have we set ourselves up for a species wide existential crisis?”

Challenger's primary focus lies in understanding how to balance human biological and primal instincts with our cognitive capabilities that have led humans to a self-conception that leans more toward machines.  She contends that our ability as humans to reconnect with our “animal-ness” could prove invaluable in navigating the future, especially in light of the growing impact of AI and robotics. 

Around the 29-minute mark, Klein makes a statement that elicits a profound and poetic response from Challenger. Their words resonate deeply, particularly when considered alongside Mollick’s insights on the implications of AI on human activity. 

Klein says:

“And it often strikes me that a lot of the anxiety people feel when they interface with these programs has to do with this question of how we judge our worth separate from our animal-ness. There’s a lot in our animal-ness that A.I., we know has no relationship to. It can’t listen to music. It can’t birth a child. It can’t feel a lot of what we can feel, the sort of embodied nature of our intelligence, it doesn’t have.

But if you build your worth as a human being off of creative cognitive processes, which we often do because we measure people through their value to the economy. And you have now systems that can write an essay as well as a human being or come up with answers to scientific questions as well as a human being or whatever it might be. And some of them we don’t have yet, but we will soon. Then you end up in very dangerous metaphysical territory as a species.

And I’m not the first to observe this, Meghan O’Gieblyn and others have made this point. But the ways in which A.I. is shaking our sense of self seems precisely related to how narrow and distant from our sensations and our bodies our sense of worth had become.”

Challenger responds:

“There’s a beautiful provocation there isn’t there? So if we go back to this idea that separating ourselves from being animal in many different ways has solved the moral problem that we might face — so why do we justify factory farming for instance? How do we justify the extent to which we utilize and exploit the living world, how do we justify the kind of systems that are leading to climate change?

We often fall back on this idea, we’re human beings are the only ones with moral worth, and we have our moral worth which is grounded in our particular capacities. The fact that we are incredibly intelligent, that we are rational, that we live in a cultural world, that we’re symbolic thinkers and so forth. So we have ordered our whole system of justification around our intelligence.

Now one can speculate on what’s going to happen when we find that we are confronted by a non-animal system but that has superior capacities, superior forms of rationality than us. Because human beings are not in fact brilliantly rational. We’re very biased. We’re biased even just if we’ve had a sandwich that day, let alone what our politics happen to be. Our memories are imperfect. They’re more to do with tracking who we are and not necessarily to do with remembering events perfectly.

So human beings are because we’re animals, we’re flawed in our intelligence. Yes, we are highly intelligent and interesting abstract thinkers and cultural thinkers for sure, but we’re still animals. It’s still animal intelligence. It’s flawed. It does a good job. It never does a perfect job because evolution doesn’t work that way. It does a good job. But there are always — there are payoffs.

But what if we end up with this synthetic intelligence that we’ve generated that can out-think us, outsmart us, is more rational, and is more reasonable? Will we then need to flip into a new system of justification that actually leans back into our animality, that it is our capacity for sensation, that it is our capacity for emotion, for love, maybe even our ability to be wild and irrational that is what is beautiful and meaningful? That’s possible that that could be the kind of psychological move that we make.

But then where will that leave our relationship to the rest of the living world that we’ve justified exploiting because they aren’t like that? Because they’re animals and we’re these kind of pseudo machines. So it’s an extremely interesting time.”

Ignore the Confusion!

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Wondering how to best prepare for the evolving job market of the future? Here's some straightforward advice: Embrace your humanity. Cultivate empathy, foster connections with others, become a proficient storyteller, listen sincerely, and above all, be kind and approachable. These essential soft skills may not be acquired directly from coursework or technical job tasks, but the opportunities to nurture them are abundant in your daily life. Practice by striking up conversations with strangers, engaging in meaningful dialogues, and expanding your network to include individuals from diverse backgrounds and experiences. It's in these everyday interactions that you'll develop the skills that will serve you well in navigating the ever-changing job landscape.