Will AI Produce Useless Humans?

The other day a friend proudly told me she wrote a heartwarming graduation card to her teenage son.

“Okay,” she confessed. “I didn’t write it. ChatGPT did.”

I’d heard about leveraging the powerful OpenAI chatbot to pen lengthy research papers—even to create a month’s worth of social media posts. But a personal congratulatory message to your child?

“How long was your card?” I asked her.

“Oh. About 200 words or so.”

“Didn’t you want to say something . . . personal?”

“Yes, of course. But the AI can say it so much better. I’m not a writer.”

And she never will be. If she lets AI do her thinking—and doing—for her.

Herein lies the crux of the real challenge with artificial intelligence: It’s not so much the threat that AI will blow up the world Terminator-style, although that’s still on the table.

Instead, AI removes struggle, undermining what it means to be human.

As Scientific American reports, English cabbies once had enlarged brains when they were forced to memorize 25,000 city streets—rather than rely on a GPS for directions. “[Neuroscientist Eleanor] Maguire discovered that London taxi drivers had more gray matter in their posterior hippocampi than people who were similar in age, education, and intelligence, but who did not drive taxis. In other words, taxi drivers had plumper memory centers than their peers.”

That’s not all. Centuries ago, mariners were paragons of self-reliance. Lacking GPS, not to mention maps, they leveraged the stars, moon, planets, and sun to navigate vast oceans as they crisscrossed the globe.

Nowadays?

You’d be hard-pressed to find any taxi or Uber driver to take you several miles to your destination without first consulting their smartphone.

The same holds true with math.

Just a few years ago, students could do multiplication and long division in their heads. Reportedly, NASA astronaut Buzz Aldrin used an analog slide rule to compute last-minute landing calculations. Today? Most of us rely on calculators. We couldn’t solve for the square root of anything to save our lives.

Now along comes ChatGPT and suddenly, we are outsourcing much, much more to machines. Just last week, the Wall Street Journal revealed AI is killing office work, dismantling white collar jobs as know them: “A once-in-a-generation convergence of technology and pressure to operate more efficiently has corporations saying many lost jobs may never return.”

Reflecting this trend, “Roughly 7,800 IBM jobs could be replaced by AI, automation,” as reported by Bloomberg. Likewise, McDonald’s and other fast-food chains are going the way of China, automating service jobs to cut costs. And, of course, many grocery stores now offer self-checkout, once more effacing people.

What does this portend for humanity?

If you subscribe to the beliefs of MIT Technology Review, ChatGPT will just “change” education, not destroy it. A recent piece heralds advances in reading and writing as positives not unlike the calculator: “Advanced chatbots could be used as powerful classroom aides that make lessons more interactive, teach students media literacy, generate personalized lesson plans, save teachers time on admin, and more.”

I beg to differ.

When I first launched my creative company in 2015, I used to offer college essay coaching services. Over a two-year span I coached dozens of high schoolers. Not one could write a good paper on their own. (And this was after colleges drastically dropped word count requirements, making it easier.)

Not only that, but many also couldn’t even generate a topic on their own. They lacked creativity to dream up their own ideas, much less the critical thinking skills to put themselves in the shoes of their audience, imagining what would land. But they all had 4.0 GPAs or higher and came from private schools in Orange County and LA, reflecting our watered-down educational system.

And now we’re being told ChatGPT is a boon for our students?

Despite these concerns, our best days are ahead of us. As a positive futurist, I see the AI surge as a wakeup call. Especially in corporate America. For too long, we’ve outsourced too much. As just one example, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed how reliant we are on countries like China for manufacturing, including our critical medical supply chain.

Now that even white-collar service work is at risk of increased automation, both consumers and providers are pushing back. I recently spoke to Daniel Scott Johnson, owner/founder of Windfall Advisors, a registered investment advisory (RIA) firm specializing in managing sudden liquidity events such as inheritances, divorce settlements, business sales, and/or big professional wins in sports and entertainment.

A contributor to CNN and CNBC, Johnson has witnessed a growing desire for the human touch when it comes to the financial sector. “2023 was a banner year for instability. We’ve seen extraordinary market turmoil. Just this month we witnessed the second biggest bank collapse in US history with First Republic’s implosion. This has really shaken people, undermining confidence.”

Of course, feelings of confidence—or its antithesis, fear—are human emotions. Something ChatGPT, with all its newfangled abilities, will never possess. Yes, the powerful chatbot may be able to pass the Wharton MBA exam and compose a sonnet in iambic pentameter while channeling the verbal style of Lana Del Rey—but it cannot get shook up.

It also can’t meet you in person and talk you through your fears. Or hopes. “Compassion is an underrated tool in the typical financial advisor’s toolbox,” says Johnson. “No matter how advanced tech gets, people have core psychological needs, one of which is to be seen and heard. By other people. To this point, I grew up as the brother of a special needs child and served on the Board of Directors for United Cerebral Palsy Wheels of LA Division. I hold a particular soft spot for individuals overcoming loss, disabilities, and divorce. When clients come to me, it’s never just about picking this stock or this bond; it’s about the personal connection. When it comes to something as significant as one’s finances, people want to work with someone they like. Someone they trust. Someone . . . human.”

This is not to say there isn’t a place for AI-based assistance.

Tedious jobs, especially white-collar ones, have long deserved our ire. (There’s a reason why we identify with Peter and his coworkers as they mercilessly smash a printer with baseball bats in the satire Office Space.)

Take legal busy work. DoNotPay, “The World’s First Robot Lawyer,” as the company bills itself, can already tackle the annoyances of fighting parking tickets and canceling subscriptions.

Today, this mainly benefits consumers, but AI also promises to expand many a law firm’s capabilities—without usurping counsel themselves. As Andrew Louder told me, there’s a veritable explosion of AI-based software now available to lawyers drowning in paperwork. The CEO of Louder Co., Louder and his team solve complex business problems through innovation. In other words, they help companies find the right AI tools, then handhold companies through integration, improving their daily operations.

“We recently found the perfect solution for our law firm client,” said Louder. “At the time they suffered from major inefficiencies. Their outdated discovery process was so time-consuming it was leading to major staff burnout. Worse, clients felt frustrated, leading some to want to jump ship.”

Since researching AI resources and presenting viable candidates to strained businesses is what Louder Co. does, he and his team went to work. They found the right fit in Nextpoint, an eDiscovery platform offering unlimited data uploads and strong collaboration tools. “Because of this software,” says Louder, “the law firm could sidestep an antiquated manual process that was killing office morale and stunting productivity.”

Returning to our argument for greater human agency in the AI age, none of the applications we’re discussing renders people moot. Instead, they supercharge our powers. The German philosopher Ernst Christian Kapp, advanced a philosophy of technology as far back as the 19^th century. According to Kapp, all the technical objects we create may be likened to human projections, extending our natural abilities to unprecedented dimensions.

A simple example? The pencil.

Long before the typewriter, it enabled us to objectify the contents of our minds, to engage in a kind of telepathy whereby we transmit our thoughts to others across space and time. (Kapp himself exemplifies this idea, since even now we are interacting with his notions more than a hundred years since his death.)

Of course, in the year 2023, the keyboard I am typing on—wirelessly connected to my computer—itself jacked into the World Wide Web disseminating my thoughts—supercharges my natural abilities. My words can be broadcast anywhere in the world in mere seconds.

Especially if you share this article!

But that doesn’t mean such technology must be a crutch, threatening to make me obsolete. Instead, it’s occurring in symbiosis: AI is augmenting personal human agency to loftier heights. Not supplanting it.

Moving forward, as ChatGPT, Google Bard, and all the other AI iterations advance to more dizzying degrees, let us not forget these apps are meant to serve us, not replace us. And by the way, this message isn’t just directed at so many tech purveyors offering us marvels of innovation.

It’s for you, dear consumer.

The next time you have a chance to write your child’s graduation card, do it yourself. Ditto for navigation. Ditch your GPS to find your own way.

These are but a few of the real pleasures to being human.