What role does human insight play in the age of AI?

May 31, 2023
Office Hours

Humanity is rapidly approaching a world where most codified, written knowledge can be accessed and synthesized almost instantly. This will create a world of new opportunities in areas like investment and market research, product development and other critical business functions.

But intuitively, most humans understand that truly great decision-making requires more than instant access to codified knowledge & data. But why?

In an ironic but enlightening experiment, we decided to pose this question to ChatGPT:

"What role does human insight play in a world where AI has made codified knowledge more or less instantly accessible?"

The answers were insightful:

"Even in a world where AI has made much of the world's codified knowledge more or less instantly accessible, human insight still plays a crucial role in a number of areas:

  1. Understanding uncodified knowledge: While AI can help make codified knowledge accessible, there's a vast amount of uncodified knowledge that humans possess. This includes tacit knowledge, experiential knowledge, and knowledge that's hard to access, articulate or codify.
  2. Complex decision making in uncertain environments: AI is brilliant at processing information quickly, but it doesn't have the ability to critically evaluate and interpret that information like a human can. Humans can consider the context, nuances, and potential biases in the information, and can make judgments about its reliability and relevance.
  3. Creative problem-solving: Humans are able to think creatively, generate new ideas, and come up with innovative solutions to problems. AI can help with this by providing data and information, but the creative spark often comes from human insight.
  4. Emotional intelligence: AI can analyze data, but it doesn't have emotional intelligence. Humans understand other people's feelings, motivations, and needs, and can use this understanding to navigate complex social situations, build relationships, and inspire others.
  5. Ethics and values: Decisions that involve ethical considerations or value judgments are often best made by humans, because these decisions require an understanding of cultural, societal, and personal values that AI doesn't have.

In essence, AI can provide us with information and tools, but it's the human insight that determines how we use these tools and what we create with them. The combination of AI and human insight can be much more powerful than either one alone."

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