WHY HUMAN QUALITIES MAY ACTUALLY BE MORE CRITICAL IN THE AGE OF AI, NOT LESS

I’ve shot a lot of business conferences and networking events across the last year, both as filmmaker and as photographer, and of course there hasn’t been a single one where AI didn’t feature as a prime topic. And while it is easy to see the vast dehumanising shadow of Palentir falling across us like the grim reaper on steroids, it is also very notable that in every single one of those conferences, the audiences were humans listening TO ANOTHER HUMAN.

That is important to remember. If AI were as wonderful as it’s most vocal supporters claim, why on earth would anyone give their time, even their money, to sit in a room listening to another human being tell them so, when technology could inform them quicker, better, cheaper?

Because, for all our faults, humans are amazing. For all we might grumble and worry about how other people behave, how we might dread crowds or fear our boss, or mistrust a colleague or suffer at the hands of a competitor, we absolutely CRAVE one another, we long to be together.

Because, like it or not, terrible as we are, we love each other and need each other. In the same way one might huddle round a camp fire for warmth, we lean in to the person who has something interesting to say, who is engaging, quite simply, by dint of their very humanity.

One can only hope that the decimation of University jobs and the continued appalling cynical absurdity of seeing education as only either trade apprenticeships or pointless crushing debt bait for young people comes to an end, and that we start to truly value human knowledge and human intuition.

Surely we know a great film is made by a great director, a great novel is written by a great writer, that the funniest comedians are flawed and unique, that to get a great portrait photograph - as with achieving a great work performance - you need someone who can guide, charm, understand and empathise, to squeeze the best of your human character from you. And that we relearn the value of humans for everything they can be and do for each other that an agorithm or a robot cannot, for being interesting, likeable, engaging, challenging, complex, knowledgeable, empathetic, funny, infuriating, charming, and unpredictable. Because without relationships, without human interaction, what are we living for?

I might once have thought this was desperate attempt at optimism. But finally an Industry AI hotshot has also said it.

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