Artificial intelligence, or AI, is changing a lot of things. AI can be a valuable tool; it's useful in online research, where it acts as a sort of search engine on steroids, in that it can be used to do at least some of the sorting of wheat from chaff that humans used to have to do manually in a web search. It can answer complicated queries and can give you links back to original information. It can solve a lot of problems, and it is useful in lots of ways.
But it can't create anything new. It can't innovate. It can't really interact. It has no empathy, no human feeling, and most of all, it lacks the small imperfections and idiosyncrasies that characterize human interactions. Oh, I know, some chatbots claim to be able to carry on conversations, but from what little I've seen, there's a deep uncanny valley there. AI is changing our world, to one degree or another, but it's also raising the value of things it can't do.
Every new technology, every innovation, has had some effect on the economy, on our lifestyles. One major change resulted in the advent of the automobile; once Henry Ford's plant started churning out Model Ts that were affordable to the average middle-class folks, an affordable automobile that was available in any color you wanted as long as it was black, then everything changed. A lot of livery stables, horse tack makers, and carriage-makers went out of business, and they doubtless weren't very happy about it.
But some of those carriage-makers went on to produce custom interiors and exteriors for high-end automobiles. They adapted. They found a way to make their skills continue to pay. That will also be the case in the world of AI.
Case in point: Human performances, as in, on stage. AI cannot replace those. The Daily Economy's Kimberlee Josephson shares one such experience.
This summer, I was attending a performance of The Sleeping Beauty at London’s Royal Albert Hall, when during a particularly ambitious dance lift, something went slightly awry and an audible gasp swept through the audience. The dancers recovered so quickly and continued so seamlessly, that the moment was gone almost before I could register what I had seen. Far from diminishing the experience, that flicker of uncertainty heightened everyone’s engagement, because it reminded us that we were watching genuine human excellence unfold in real time rather than a digitally perfected production. The possibility of imperfection made the achievement feel meaningful.
In an age when almost anything can be flawlessly rendered by a machine, that small margin of human error is turning into one of the most valuable things left on the market.
Ay, there's the rub. And it's not just show business, although that makes a compelling case; I recall in 1978 or so, when some friends and I drove to St. Paul, Minnesota, to take in a Led Zeppelin concert. We worked our way right up to the stage; we were within 10 feet of Robert Plant as he roared out "The Immigrant Song", and that's not an experience any machine can produce: The music, the vocals, how they varied just a bit from the studio recordings we were already familiar with; the sweat and roar of the crowd, the friendly jostling. All of that was human. All of that can only be human.
AI can't produce that. AI cannot reproduce those purely human variations, those spur-of-the-moment live actions that can only be done by talent moving on the fly. AI cannot replicate that feeling of being in the crowd.
It's not just performances that will change. Take healthcare; for a physician, AI may well be a valuable tool. It can produce a catalog of items it knows. But it can't intuit. It can't interact with a patient. It lacks the human judgment, the ability to look in a patient's eyes, to evaluate not just lab numbers but the person themselves; there are times when how a patient presents to a human eye is far more revealing than a look at sterile lab results. AI can't produce that. That can only be human.
AI cannot create. It can only remix things that are already available to it. AI cannot intuit. It lacks judgment and empathy. AI cannot empathize. It lacks the necessary human feeling, the ability to look at and talk to another person, and develop some insight into their point of view.
Yes, the advent of AI will change many things. Some sectors of the economy will suffer. Two of our four daughters are freelance graphic artists, and they are concerned about how AI is taking work from them, and they are right to be concerned. My advice to them? Either develop your own styles, your own abilities, to make them stand out, or find a way to make that new tool work for you- to augment, not to replace, your natural skills and experiences. Employ and embrace those little idiosyncrasies that can only be human. People will always know the difference.
And, in time, those purely human skills will be worth more, not less. Because they cannot be replaced, not by a machine, not by a screen, not by a program. They remain solely the province of people, and there will always be a place in the economy for just that. And AI will remain what it is: A tool.
