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Why humans will always stay ahead of AI

by | Nov 11, 2017 | Open Leadership, Self-Knowledge, Storytelling

“May you live in interesting times” 

A little research attributes this to Sir Austen Chamberlain in 1936, soon before his brother was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and had to do the best with the tools he had to politically address the challenge that was Adolf Hitler. Suffice to say that he had limited success, as his brother had somehow unconsciously predicted with what has since been embellished to be called “the Chinese curse”.

So, we definitely now live in interesting times. Things are changing faster than ever and we won’t be able to cope at all with current leadership models.

In recent articles I wrote about :

  • Zen and Teaching your son to drive
    • In which I discuss the “competency model” of four stages of learning, showing how we learn new things in phases and the keys to successful teaching, or transference of knowledge.
  • Forget knowledge, simply lead
    • Even with the above, we cannot possibly keep up with the rate of growth in knowledge in the world, so we must shift leadership paradigms to that of #OpenLeadership, Lead, don’t seek to be the omnipotent expert, nor educate our children on that model. We have Google for raw knowledge!

Now take the core “competency model” and then the curve version, and imagine just how impossible it is to imagine our learning and teaching each new piece of knowledge up our “Moore’s Law” exponential curve of learning as the speed continues to increase.

The first one is the core model :

Conscious Model

This is how it looks energetically as we process each new learning :

Phases of Learning

Now imagine that dip, trough, effort to climb up the curve all the way up an exponential learning curve :

Humans Progress

In short :

AI

Is the world as we know it over? Will be taken over by machines? Are we already living in the Matrix?

I cannot be sure, but I am hugely positive about the innate magic of humans, and I feel we have a massive untapped resource available to us that is one that AI may perhaps never replicate.

What is that secret, you say? Energy, emotion, and so Empathy. The ability to feel our own feelings and to feel those of others.

Stay with me on this one. Leadership is all about reading and managing energy. Without boring you on the science, humans make ALL decisions based on our feelings, and NONE based on our rationality and intellect.

As this post is published I am at the Kilkenomics festival and am at odds with many trained economists here who feel we make decisions rationally. I also heard an ex central banker of high reputation (yes, a good fellow!) call Behavioural Economics “a quirk”. Not one of the many economists appearing identifies themselves at all as a behavioural economist. I guess it isn’t my echo chamber?

Anyway, from all I have come to learn as first a chartered accountant then business builder then coach and sounding board, we do things because they make us feel good, we only THINK (get it!) we rationalise.

Perhaps the themes of #OpenLeadership can show us the way?

Unthinkable model humans bravery