How Generative AI can make us Hyper-Human

Judgement Day? 

What do August 29th 1997 and November 30th 2022 and have in common? [Pauses for a few minutes whilst you scratch you head.] 

Well, the former is the day when Skynet became self-aware. The latter is when Open AI foisted ChatGPT on the world.  

Still unclear?  

If I said “Hasta La Vista, Baby” you’d probably start to recall ‘The Terminator’ franchise and the story of how Cyberdyne Systems created Skynet, the artificial neural network-based conscious group mind and artificial general superintelligence system. 

Once Skynet became self-aware, humans panicked, tried to deactivate it, sparking nuclear war and the end of civilisation.  

The release of ChatGPT brought this all back to mind as people quickly headed for the hills and proclaimed all our roles in market research dead.  

Game Over. 

But really. People. Is that actually what is happening? 

Today, August 4, 1997, Cyberdyne Systems’ supercomputer network Skynet goes online (Terminator 2: Judgment Day)
pic.twitter.com/5XcUhiUTNT

— Today On Screen (@todayonscreen) August 4, 2020

Don’t Fight It, Feel It. 

Having spent my last decade in insights focused exclusively on the digital transformation of businesses, any backlash against generative AI feels misplaced.  

For all those years, when interviewing senior stakeholders and agency bosses, the common complaints have been on issues around productivity, quality of output and lack of influence in the boardroom: 

“It’s so frustrating: my people spend too much time doing manual jobs like checking data, rewriting the same proposal over and over from scratch, trawling through our servers looking for useful case studies, making charts in PowerPoint……..all of which means we don’t get to impactful insights quickly enough to affect key decisions at the top. I need them to get to the point quicker, tell meaningful stories at speed about what it means, why the client should care and what they should do about it.” 

Contrast this composite quote with another from the employee perspective: 

“It’s so frustrating: I spend too much time doing manual jobs like checking data, rewriting the same proposal over and over from scratch, trawling through our servers looking for useful case studies, making charts in PowerPoint……..all of which means I don’t get to impactful insights quickly enough to affect key decisions at the top. I’d love to be able to get to the point quicker, tell meaningful stories at speed about what it means, why the client should care and what they should do about it.” 

Finally, from the senior client side, there’s a third viewpoint: 

“It’s so frustrating: it seems like my agencies spend too much time doing manual jobs like checking data, rewriting the same proposal over and over from scratch, trawling through their servers looking for useful case studies, making charts in PowerPoint…all of which means they don’t get to impactful insights quickly enough to affect key decisions at the top. I’d love them to be able to get to the point quicker, tell meaningful stories at speed about what it means, why we should care and what we should do about it.” 

You get the point, right? 

The problem is that, to-date, technology and automation has largely resulted in two problems: 

1. Added to workloads and stress: behaviour change is hard and because people don’t want to fundamentally change their processes, tech is introduced that really just papers over the cracks – or worse, creates even more friction in the workflow 
2. Been so reductive that – in pursuit of speed, price and efficiency – thoughtfulness and nuance is becoming a lost art. You can have it cheaper and faster, but you can’t have it better. Or you can have it better and faster, but you can’t have it cheaper. Or you can have it better and cheaper but you can’t have it faster 

And so, we get stuck, like Canute at the edge of the sea, hoping somehow that the technology waves will stop coming at us so fast, because our experiences to date have been overwhelming for our capacity to master them and underwhelming for the end impact we can have on giving our clients a competitive edge. 

And if an AI chatbot can do all of these things then what’s the point of me? Should we disable Skynet now?

Hell no! Now’s the time to own it. It finally feels like the revolution is ready to be helpful and make us more human than ever before. Or as John Connor might say: “The future has not been written. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.”  

Are we human, or are we dancer? 

The more skills we possess, the better we are as human beings and the more valuable we are to our clients, our colleagues and society at large. 

The skills we once had are being replaced by something new, by technology. This is a story as old as time itself.  

Presumably then we need a whole new set of skills, skills that will take us years to learn and by the time we master them, we’re retired? 

No, actually. We simply need to remind ourselves of the one skill we have that the machines don’t: the art of being human and the art of human relationships. It’s always been about people.  

People help people make better decisions by helping them understand the steps they need to take, when and how, in order to grow their business and give them a competitive edge. 

They do this by making qualitative and quantitative insight more useful and impactful through stories that inspire and by collaborating and creating solutions together in groups. 

They do this by understanding the business up close and personal, by understanding the context for insight and the challenges their clients face to make change happen.  

They do this by spending time on building the relationship with their clients, by thoughtfully understanding the relationships people have with brands, products and services and by digging deep into the relationships we have with each other and society and culture at large. 

And what is the single biggest reason why this doesn’t happen as well as we’d all really like it to? 

“… spend too much time doing manual jobs like checking data, rewriting the same proposal over and over from scratch, trawling through their servers looking for useful case studies, making charts in PowerPoint……..” 

And all of those repeatable, repetitive, vital, necessary tasks can be done much better by machines than they can by humans. So let’s make the machines dance to our tune and not the other way round. 

Let us not just be more human, but more skilled at being human.  

Let’s be hyper human in the age of AI.  

By Richard Owen, Head of Innovation, FIREFISH