I’m tired of “be better than AI.”
That’s where the the conversation is stuck today. Because AI is good at lots of things, we need to be better than AI to secure our jobs. Bleh.
When we talk about AI that way, we’re letting AI define our success.
I want the conversation to shift to “do the things that AI can’t” — and that means embracing our humanity over anything else.
Today when people talk about “be better than AI,” they often talk about having taste. It’s not taste. I just wrote about the problem of bad taste. The people making big strategy decisions have bad taste, and AI does a good enough job for their bad taste. Your good taste doesn’t matter if you get laid off.
It’s also not expertise. AI keeps getting better, and it will become good enough compared to any expert. And for most work, a true expert isn’t needed because the deciders won’t see the difference between expert work and AI work.
So what can you do that AI can’t?
Connect to other people.
Real connection. Trust, confidence, belief. The kind of connection that AI can’t do.
At work, the people who succeed are the ones who build connections with their coworkers. They’re the ones who are the best to work with, who enable other people to do their best work, who you always trust to do great work.
AI can’t connect to your coworkers. It won’t make them better. And you can’t always trust it.
Connecting to people includes connecting to the people you’re serving — your customers and clients. You connect with them by listening, watching, learning — to understand their problems and build trust to help them succeed.
AI is poor at connecting to people — at understanding human behavior, at discovering the nuance, at being curious about people, at building trust and confidence. To do great work for people, you need to dig into that gap between what people say versus what they do. AI can’t do that, but human connection can.
The advantage you have over AI comes from the immeasurable skills of your humanity, not the measurable skills of your trade.
In a world where AI is redefining “work,” we need a radical redefinition of what makes us human. So let’s be more human.
It starts with connection.