How to Get Ready for the Higher Order Tasks when AI is Ready for the routine One’s

Premise:

There is a lot being said about the capabilities of AI tools and how they can bring in so much efficiencies and free up humans to do higher value tasks instead. So, I have been thinking about what these higher value work would look like?

Given the depth and width of knowledge and skills that these tools have amassed, is there any skill that we can bring to the table to ensure that we are not becoming redundant?

Here is what I have come up with. There are 5 skills that are still uniquely human and that any AI tool might be hard pressed to acquire any time soon.

Initiation

As far as I know and understand, all AI tools require someone or something to bring it alive and do what it is supposed to do. I don’t know of any AI tool that could initiate a project or a discussion or a course all by itself, with no one prompting it, yet.

As Humans, we can initiate projects – an art project, a blog or a YouTube channel or writing a book, all by ourself, whenever we want and with no need for someone to prompt us to do so.

Intention

As far as I know, no AI tool can set an intent for itself by itself. We can give an intention to the tool by grounding it in a document or prompting it with an intention.

However, as humans, we are capable of setting clear intentions, not only for ourselves for our entire community (however small or large that is). This intentionality allows us to build collective futures.

Imagination

This is a bit of a tough one. While AI tools do imagine or hallucinate, they don’t imagine like we do. They could imagine if prompted in a specific direction but as far as I know, they are still very limited and are completely dependent on the prompting for them to imagine new futures.

As humans, we are much better at imagining new futures, imagining different futures and collective futures. We have the ability to also quickly realise the practicality of each one of these imagined futures.

Intuition

While AI tools are really good at pattern recognition, which allows them the ability to intuit, but it is still limited to the digital realm. While there are some AI tools that are rooted in physics (video generation tools) that can go much beyond this limitation, we still have a much better abiltiy and intuition in the real world.

And some of us who have mastered our craft, our intuition about our craft (narrow intelligence) would be better, specially when it comes to edge or uncommon situations.

In conclusion:

When you bring all of these skills together, we can make magic happen. However, the amount of investments (intellectual and financial capital) that is flowing into making these AI tools better, they are bound to get better across all of these categories.

So, we have a small window of time for which we are still much better than the AI tools in these areas. Now it is our responsibility to invest in our own learning and continue to learn and become an expert on a given topic and develop the intuition that can help us solve edge cases, in addition to everyday common challenges.

Better Judgement

When all of these abilities come together, they help us develop better judgement and in the world where AI is great at thinking and doing stuff, humans with better judgement are needed to decide where to deploy the AI.

I have always said –

Once Machines and algorithms start learning, they will never stop; Neither should we!!

• Mukesh Gupta