It’s said that as work becomes increasingly automated thanks to artificial intelligence, our special human traits — empathy and humor, creativity and kindness — will become only more valuable.
I wonder. What we’ve seen so far doesn’t leave me optimistic.
Instead of embracing what makes us different from machines, we humans often seem to be trying to imitate them. Too many of us skip lunch, eschew breaks and work more feverishly, as if we’re just brains attached to rather inefficient, fleshy hardware — the bodies that (irritatingly) get sick, break down and require regular feeding and rest. Or we try to do too many things at once — texting while driving, emailing during meetings — as if we’re a laptop that can run multiple programs instead of a human that can focus on only one thing at a time.