But, even if they’re right, only humans have the anticipation and judgement to solve future problems. That means that the status quo solves, or nothing does.
De Cremer and Kasparov 21 – *Professor in Management and Organizations at the NUS Business School at the National University of Singapore; Director of the Centre on AI Technology for Humankind at NUS Business School; **Chairman of the Human Rights Foundation, Founder of the Renew Democracy Initiative.
*David De Cremer and **Garry Kasparov, “AI Should Augment Human Intelligence, Not Replace It,” Harvard Business Review, 03-18-2021, https://hbr.org/2021/03/ai-should-augment-human-intelligence-not-replace-it
In general, people recognize today’s advanced computers as intelligent because they have the potential to learn and make decisions based on the information they take in. But while we may recognize that ability, it’s a decidedly different type of intelligence what we posses.
In its simplest form, AI is a computer acting and deciding in ways that seem intelligent. In line with Alan Turing’s philosophy, AI imitates how humans act, feel, speak, and decide. This type of intelligence is extremely useful in an organizational setting: Because of its imitating abilities, AI has the quality to identify informational patterns that optimize trends relevant to the job. In addition, contrary to humans, AI never gets physically tired and as long it’s fed data it will keep going.
These qualities mean that AI is perfectly suited to put at work in lower-level routine tasks that are repetitive and take place within a closed management system. In such a system, the rules of the game are clear and not influenced by external forces. Think, for example, of an assembly line where workers are not interrupted by external demands and influences like work meetings. As a case in point, the assembly line is exactly the place where Amazon placed algorithms in the role of managers to supervise human workers and even fire them. As the work is repetitive and subject to rigid procedures optimizing efficiency and productivity, AI is able to perform in more accurate ways to human supervisors.
Human abilities, however, are more expansive. Contrary to AI abilities that are only responsive to the data available, humans have the ability to imagine, anticipate, feel, and judge changing situations, which allows them to shift from short-term to long-term concerns. These abilities are unique to humans and do not require a steady flow of externally provided data to work as is the case with artificial intelligence.