We must learn to be more human in the age of artificial intelligence

Omar Al-Olama, AI minister of the UAE, asked Huang what people should learn themselves and educate their kids in this age of AI. Huang gave a counterintuitive answer. He said that most people think we should all learn computer science and AI programming, but we should be doing exactly the opposite. With AI, he said, it is the job of tech companies to create computing technology such that no one has to programme. Everyone in the world will become a programmer.

I agree with Huang that the greatest revolution brought about by AI and Generative AI is that the long-standing human-machine gap will close. The languages that we will use to work with computers will be human languages like English, Bengali or Spanish, and not esoteric ones like C++, Python or PHP, languages that belong to machines. Bill Gates and Satya Nadella of Microsoft have echoed this. Gates is excited that “AI is the new UI"—the user interface for machines, which moved from graphical to browsers and then apps, and will now move to human languages. Nadella has backed this up, “So far we had to learn the language of the computer, now the computer has to learn our language."

So far, the ability to make machines perform magic was restricted to a tiny fraction of our population: software engineers and programmers. The elite among them—mostly young, Caucasian and male, largely living on the US west coast—built the world around us, harnessing powerful computing machines to create new products and services that the rest of us use. With the sweeping democratization of computing that AI brings, potentially all eight billion of us become creators and builders, as instructing machines becomes a matter of speaking as we socially do. As this happens, we will need to reinforce and regain the human skills we have somehow lost or ceded to machines. As Aneesh Raman and Mari Flynn write in the New York Times (bit.ly/3TbH1mF): “There have been just a handful of moments over the centuries when we have experienced a huge shift in the skills our economy values most. We are entering one such moment now. Technical and data skills that have been highly sought after for decades appear to be among the most exposed to advances in artificial intelligence. But other skills, particularly the people skills that we have long undervalued as soft, will very likely remain the most durable…. Work (will be) anchored more, not less, around human ability. A LinkedIn research estimates that 96% of a software engineers’ current skills, which is mainly how to write code in programming languages, will be taken over by AI; 70% of executives said soft skills—interpersonal relationships, negotiating, motivating teams, etc—were more important than technical AI skills."

Thus, it is the skills that made us human that will come to the fore. The use of language is one—how we employ and manipulate the English language to write the best ‘prompts’ to tease out the most optimal answer, appealing art or useful code from a machine. This will be followed by other key human skills, like how we show the answers and data elicited from machines to people, how we work with them and persuade them to our point of view, and how we leverage the relationships we have built to bring them to our point of view. The knowledge economy will give way to the relationship economy. As Minouche Shafik of Columbia University says: “In the past, jobs were about muscles. Now they’re about brains, but in the future, they’ll be about the heart."

This will have profound implications for our educational system, which has been obsessively STEM-focused of late. The original subjects taught in our ancient monasteries and schools will come back: language and grammar, logic, mathematics and philosophy. Humanities, finally, will have a dominant say in technology, as empathy, creativity and felicity with language are valued more. Raman and Flynn go on to write: “AI will probably give us fantastic tools that will help us outsource a lot of our current mental work. At the same time, AI will force us humans to double down on those talents and skills that only humans possess. The most important thing about AI may be that it shows us what it can’t do, and so reveals who we are and what we have to offer."

We will learn to be more human in the coming age of AI.