Guest Post: AI Can’t Replace Humans When It Comes to Trust
Contributing author Carlos Araujo returns right on time to address AI fatigue.
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Artificial intelligence (AI) can’t replace human-centric interaction that creates and strengthens trust. Perhaps this is a blunt take on the “all-about-AI” times that we are experiencing now. Let’s unpack this topic, take time for self-reflection, and contribute to the discussion.
Why does AI lack trust?
No accountability: While recommendations and even decisions e.g., firing an employee, can be delegated to AI processes in the name of efficiency, they conveniently avoid personal responsibility. Lack of transparency and ownership for the results of such processes create dangerous and damaging personal, professional, and public environments.
No ethical judgement: Statistical probabilities with optimal i.e., highest, fastest, cheapest results are calculated based on past human data, recognizing patterns but not reasoning them. No value or moral compass is considered. Historical biases e.g., societal prejudices, are masked and replicated, with right and wrong ultimately indistinguishable.
No authenticity: AI output presents a uniform, surface-level style and absence of genuine intention, synthesizing existing data without real human input including visible labor, skill, and vulnerability. A unanimous consequence is growing skepticism, caution, and fatigue toward synthetic content, and the negative impact on credibility is especially significant, which can be devastating to individuals and organizations.
Where do human beings (still) do better than AI?
High-stakes decisions: Unobvious nuances and growing complexities require critical thinking to question facts, analyze hidden context, and make wise choices with real human impact consequences. For example, many dynamics on personal and professional life are critically influenced by informal networks, and most of the time are not documented or captured as any type of data.
Relational work: Strong relationships depend on mutual vulnerability i.e., acknowledging what we need, fear, or don’t know, and shared physical or emotional presence, which cannot be realized by AI. Machines truly can’t experience vulnerability or empathy and, therefore, could care less about relationships.
Emotional intelligence: Jill Bolte Taylor shared “Most of us think of ourselves as thinking creatures that feel, but we are actually feeling creatures that think.” This emphasizes our human nature, i.e., how we mostly tend to behave driven by our feelings, despite of efforts to rationalize everything we do. The ability to understand and manage our own emotions and feel empathy for others is deemed essential to our progress and success.
I share one final thought about a recent discussion about AI in the corporate world. Current business leaders are part of a generation that developed their careers by consistently investing their energy and time in trusted relationships, navigating the good and not-so-good cycles, learning the hard way about employee reliability - all that without AI. Those leaders demonstrate adaptability to embrace new technologies including AI; however, human-centric interactions that create and strengthen trust continue to be their go-to approach. Will next-gen Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) invalidate my arguments? We shall see.