Lately, there have been fears that AI will take people’s jobs away. Although the demise of humanity has been and will continue to be predicted with every technological revolution. The new is alien and therefore scary.
I happened to listen to a talk by the Brazilian philosopher Lúcia Helena Galvão, where she aptly pointed out that the danger is that you take away AI’s work, rather than the other way around.
I very much agree with him. It is time to start discussing what it means to be human and to be human. Only then can we talk about managing people. And this debate on what it means to be a human being, with its temptations, virtues and nature – this is something that we have not done in organisations at large.
I see this often in my management training work, where people are expected to have ‘practical tools’ to work with people. The human being is not a machine to use practical TOOLS with! Training sessions filled with practical “tools” describe very well the nature and depth of the problem of treating people as machines in organizations.
We take the work out of AI ourselves. Every time we start behaving like machines. For example, if you work long days without a break, don’t allow yourself to feel emotions, don’t dare to make mistakes, “have” to be available 24/7, want to be efficient, fast and flawless at every moment, it’s time for AI to take over, because you live like a machine. But a human is not a machine, a house or a building.
Organizations are constructs designed by humans. And inside this machine, we have gradually become the result of our own creation – a nut in the machine.
No wonder if in the end there is nothing left of the person in this machine, or organisation, mental health problems increase, etc. The job of a machine is to be a machine. To be human is to be human.
However, when a human tries to imitate a machine, we are entering strange territory. Because a machine can do:
– more,
– faster,
– more efficiently,
– tirelessly.
Not human.
When we try to be machines, we are not competing with AI, we are simply losing our humanity. But it is this humanity that is our greatest advantage:
* empathy,
* presence,
* intuition,
* creating meaning,
* inner wisdom,
* the ability to create something that has never existed before.
If we try to be machines, we will fall below the machines. But don’t take AI’s work away! Reclaim your role – being human – and give up the machine part to the machines.
