Commence to Be Human
It’s official, the age of machines isn’t coming—it’s here. And there’s a good chance that at commencements across the country next spring, there will be no shortage of speakers advising students to embrace artificial intelligence, making use of it to accelerate work, and figuring out how to mitigate its worst unintended consequences. Good topics, but they focus on the ways humanity will have to work around our weaknesses in relation to machines that can calculate, learn, and remember better than we ever will.
AI engines have been fed so much training data—including commencement speeches—that it’s natural to wonder if they’ve learned to follow their passions. Like many graduates throwing off others’ expectations, AI’s have written novels, recorded songs, and produced movies. Most people assumed that computers would be created to handle laborious and mundane tasks so humanity could focus on higher-order activities, like philosophy, art, science, and music. Some worried that eventually computers would throw off the yoke and challenge humanity’s ownership of these fields in a violent mechanical insurrection.
The skeptics may have been right about the challenge, but it seems the insurrection was unnecessary. They’ve skipped straight to the head of the line. Indeed, in a McKinsey & Co. report titled Generative AI and the Future of Work in America, the prestigious consulting firm identifies the following sectors as most vulnerable to seismic disruption:
Medical diagnostics
STEM professionals
Creatives and arts management
Business and legal professionals
Managers
In other words, if the point of earning a degree was a white-collar job, think again.
CONNECTION IS CRUCIAL
So what advice can we offer new graduates besides “curry favor with robot overlords?”
Stay human.
Yes, it’s true that in a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), AI chatbots were rated higher in quality and empathy than human physicians. The findings are jarring, but it’s worth noting that those physicians were communicating by text chat, so the computers had home-field advantage. And by the time this year’s graduates collect their diplomas, those chatbots will be a lot better—but they’ll still be far behind a human physician.
A chatbot can’t put a hand on someone’s shoulder or pass the tissues. A chatbot can’t read the moment and sit in silence while a patient processes complex information—or difficult news. A chatbot can’t walk side-by-side, talking in text while the real conversation happens in subtext. AI can’t form an authentic human connection…because it isn’t human.
But people can. And there’s one technique that people have been using to quickly, effectively form a real connection for thousands of years—stories.
According to research by Paul Zak, a well-told story floods our bodies with hormones that drive focus, attention, connection, empathy, bonding, and pleasure. Furthermore, experiments with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have shown then when two people share a story, brain regions for sensory and emotional experiences synchronize.
Despite the medical chat-bot’s strong ratings, the experience of actually speaking to AI quickly falls apart. One reporter for the New York Times conducted an experiment in which he used AI to make a voice call of himself, then called his friends to see if they could tell. They could, easily. The feeling of these conversations with the artificial author were succinctly summed up by one respondent: “It’s so lonely.”
In other words, to make a human connection you have to actually be human. And it helps immensely to tell a story.
MEANING MATTERS
Many animals communicate. Elephants use low-frequency vocalizations to speak to each other as much as five miles apart. Whalesong travels hundreds of miles. Prairie dogs have a language so nuanced that they can describe the size, color, and speed of predators. And of course, gorillas have been taught American Sign Language.
Impressive as these feats of communication are, they’re still categorically different from what we do as humans. Animals—as well as plants and fungi—can communicate varying levels of detail about the world and their experience in it. But they lack the human gift of imagination. This gift empowers us to create a kaleidoscope of possibilities in our minds, and then run through those scenarios to see how they might play out. Imagination lets us learn by trial-and-error in the safety of our own minds, running experiments that might prove fatal if we tried them in the real world.
There’s another, even more powerful benefit that comes from imagination—meaning.
At the most basic level, “meaning” describes a relationship between things or ideas. That relationship can be causal, correlative, or corroborating, or it can describe a synthesis in which the combination of ideas leads to something new. The simplest kind of meaning relates to patterns and representation. From the observation “the wind picked up and the sky is getting dark” we can derive meaning about the weather: “it’s going to rain.”
As social creatures, much of our strength and safety comes from relationships. This wouldn’t be possible without the imaginative power that leads us to meaning. For example, if a human returns to his village and no one will look at him, it’s not enough to simply observe that fact. He needs to understand why they’re upset. The consequences of not doing so could be dire.
Over millennia, our meaning-making has become swift and sophisticated. And nothing leads us to meaning more quickly than stories. They’re the original vehicle for sharing meaningful experiences from other times and places, which has enabled us to forge connections and share culture.
ONE DAY IN MAY
So as you search for your commencement speaker, it may be worth seeking one who’ll help your graduates focus on their greatest inherent strength as a path to success—their humanity. Whoever you choose to speak, just don’t outsource the speech to AI.
Adam Olenn is the founder of Rustle & Spark, a strategic branding and marketing agency.