Core Competence Empathy

“We have to get back to doing what we do best: being human!” - Richard Seidl

No, not another article about AI. Or maybe a lot? A little? Or not at all? Well, humans are highly ambivalent beings. Entangled in contradictions, day in, day out. We don’t say what we think. We don’t do what we say. We think one thing or another half the day and constantly change our minds. To paraphrase Konrad Adenauer: “What do I care what I said yesterday, nothing prevents me from becoming wiser.” We may dislike this inconsistency in ourselves and others, but it is what defines us!

The promise of less work

Industrialization, robotics and information technology: everyone has promised us that we could automate many of our tasks if we used them correctly so that we would have more time for the finer things in life. However, when I look at the world of work today, I have slight doubts as to whether this promise has been fulfilled. I see overtime, burnout, dull daily routines and a crisis of meaning much more often than people who spend half the day reading a book under a nut tree. All right, there are certainly other influencing factors. But will this change with AI? Again, the promise of finally having a smart digital personal assistant that does and organizes everything for you. It builds texts, articles, even entire websites, and we can finally sit down under the walnut tree with a good book. Well, I don’t believe it yet. I do believe that the potential is there now. But it’s not us. And so the result will not be more free time and freedom, but more stress.

Possibility space

As always with new technology, it is superior to us in some area. Yes, and that also means that there will be new jobs and that it will cost us a few old jobs. Search engine text optimizers, for example, who adapt texts for the Internet so that the right keywords are in the right place. Not too often, but not too little either. That the right paragraph and sentence lengths are used. However, it is not about providing the reader with more exciting content, but about serving the algorithms of Google & Co. in such a way that the page ranks as high as possible. The information content is of secondary importance. AI is good at this kind of thing, and as long as you still need it, it can do it. And what about the rest? A journalist who uses AI as text support can spend more time on research, investigation and contact with people. A doctor who gets more information more quickly thanks to AI can diagnose more accurately and spend more time talking to patients. Do you understand what I’m getting at? Once again, we now have the opportunity to use technology in a meaningful way to be who we are: Human beings, relational beings.

Empathie

Wikipedia writes: “Empathy is the ability and willingness to recognize, understand and empathize with the feelings, emotions, thoughts, motives and personality traits of another person.” And further: “The basis of empathy is self-awareness - the more open a person is to their own emotions, the better they can interpret the feelings of others.” Self-awareness and empathizing with others. We have been depriving ourselves of both for some time now. Fatal, I think. Because in addition to our inconsistency, making mistakes and our other imperfections, it is precisely these two things that make us human. And AI can’t get there yet - if it ever does. That is our joker!

With this in mind, I wish you and your team more empathy and humanity and fewer autogenerated texts 😉