Share to
Facebook Share to
Twitter Share to Linkedin Will people soon learn how to be more human from AI? If you’re anything like me, you’ve had a disturbing experience lately. It typically occurs in an innocuous setting like the gym or the grocery store. You think you’re connecting with another person, having a normal conversation—and then things get weird. It happened to me last week. I was on the phone asking the auto tech for an estimate on our car repairs. Suddenly, there was a lull in the conversation. “Hello? Are you still there?” I asked. Long pause. “Yes, I am still here.” Okay. Then where’d you just go for the last 20 seconds of dead air silence? I wanted to ask. Don’t you know it’s odd to just check out of a conversation with your customer midsentence? I never did grill this customer service rep on what the heck happened. Eventually, he resumed our call like a normal person, so I let it go. But this encounter—like so many similar others—did inspire me to create a theory about what’s happening. I call it the Chatbot Paradox: The more AI improves its communication skills, the more we humans decline socially.
WWE WrestleMania 40 Results, Winners And Grades From Night 1 WWE WrestleMania 40 Results And Everything That Happened As The Rock Pins Cody Winning 1 3 Billion Powerball Ticket Sold 4th Largest Ever Here s How Much The Winner Could Take Home I am not alone in observing this phenomenon. A recent study found young people are at risk of losing the ability to detect others’ emotions because of so much digital immersion. “You can’t learn nonverbal emotional cues from a screen in the way you can learn it from face-to-face communication,” said lead author Yalda Uhls, a senior researcher with the UCLA’s Children’s Digital Media Center. “If you’re not practicing face-to-face communication, you could be losing important social skills.” These researchers are onto something, something that has a lot to do with
baseball. My co-author Randy Walton and I explore this in our new book, Hidden in Plain Sight: Communications Secrets You Are Just Not Seeing . We call the concept at bats . When it comes to America’s favorite pastime, an at bat refers to anytime a batter goes up against a pitcher. As we all know, the more at bats you have in a game, the more chances you have to get on base or score. Something analogous occurs socially, we argue. The more opportunities we have to interact with others, the more chances we get to develop and perfect our social acumen so we can get closer to becoming people whisperers —expert communicators with strong interpersonal skills. Unfortunately, the opposite is also true. If you don’t get enough social plate time, you won’t develop strong social skills. You won’t be good in a room—as they say in
Hollywood. And if you once possessed strong social skills, but don’t flex them enough, you’ll lose them. They’ll stagnate. That’s what I think is happening today. Whether it’s in the gym, the grocery store, or networking for business, we aren’t getting enough practice. Instead, we communicate behind screens—texting, Zooming, DM’ing, etc., preventing us from brushing up on the face-to-face interactions that once comprised reality until a few years ago. But you know who is getting in more socialization practice? AI. While we’re all thumbs, texting and tweeting 24/7 to our digital network, AI is getting more at bats —constantly conversing with humans in a range of settings from sales to customer service . AI is having all those conversations with actual humans we aren’t having. How bizarre is that? Weirdness aside, returning to Hidden In Plain Sight , my co-author Randy and I feature a chapter on how to learn communications skills like an AI. According to many tech experts, such as historian and philosopher Yuval Harari, AI and Big Data already know us better than we know ourselves. Facebook can reportedly tell when
Women are pregnant before they know it and will begin to show them ads for baby clothes. A related Wall Street Journal investigation found certain apps measuring health statistics, such as a woman’s weight, blood pressure, and ovulation status, offer this info to Facebook. This is the kind of data that enables the
Social Media app to extrapolate a woman’s pregnancy status. It’s amazing and alarming to realize this is the power AI already possesses—who knows what it will be able to do in a few years? It’s also empowering when we realize humans can employ a similar strategy that computer programmers use to train AIs on mastering social skills. In the spirit of learning from AI, here are the steps we might program a computer to use if we were training it to be a people whisperer. Side note: It’s imperative we humans get better at this now. If we don’t, we will be at a big disadvantage soon—especially as AI gobbles up more jobs across all sectors. Step #1 Develop Pattern Awareness Imagine anytime someone asked you question, you saw it as a personal attack and immediately became defensive. This would cripple your ability to network, much less conduct any type of sales call. To overcome this problem, you must first acknowledge you have a pattern of getting triggered when people ask questions, producing your defensive posture. If you can recognize this pattern within yourself, you can take the requisite steps to change how you interact with others. (The same goes for any social deficiency you may possess—not just getting upset by people’s queries.) Step #2 Test New Ways of Being Returning to being triggered by questions, instead of assuming people are challenging you in these social situations, try a new approach. Act as if . Behave as if people’s queries are not hostile challenges, but rather, well-meaning questions based on true curiosity. Using this new approach, how you respond can become an opportunity to share your knowledge with someone else or to discover what they’re interested in. Step #3 Evaluate the Result In this scenario, notice what happens when you respond to a question with openness rather than feeling challenged by it. Here’s another example: Imagine your social challenge is making eye contact—you have trouble keeping another’s gaze without feeling uncomfortable. Now, pay close attention to what happens when you try something new. In this case, observe what happens when you step out of your comfort zone to lock eyes with someone for a certain length of time. Evaluate the outcome: Did your social encounter unfold better or worse when you tried something new? If the new experience was positive, this shows you there’s a benefit to employing it at your next at bat —whether that means reframing your response to questions or sustaining eye contact. Either way, you’re reinforcing desirable behavior that produces positive social outcomes. The next time you’re at bat with someone you will know what works best to produce the optimal interaction. And the next time, and the next time—leading you to develop better social patterns. Just like an AI. Step 4: Reinforce the New Pattern Deliberately Like any skill, we must develop muscle memory when it comes to mastering interpersonal communication. No matter what new things you try—reinterpreting how you perceive questions, sustaining eye contact, being intentional with your body language—allow this new positive behavior to cascade, employing it again and again so it becomes your new routine. ***** As you improve your social skills with more at bats, you will change from the inside out for the better. Returning to computer-speak, you can think of this updated version of yourself as the 2.0 model! Now anytime you’re triggered by an at bat that doesn’t go your way, you can use this data to further refine your approach—making what works your North Star. Again, just like an AI. One final thought: Unlike AIs, we humans need tension for growth. The phrase “no pain, no gain” is apt here. Think of the person who broke their leg and is now learning to walk again in rehab. They won’t feel good at first. Likewise, learning a new language—especially in a foreign country where you’re bound to feel stupid as you stumble over your words—is also no fun. To reiterate, honing your social skills, especially if they’re lacking, can be uncomfortable. The way around this? Assume a childlike enthusiasm for the unknown. This is the point professor Adam Grant makes in his book Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things . “This is the first form of courage: being brave enough to embrace discomfort and throw your learning style out the window.” Think about it like this: When a baby learns to crawl, it’s not awkward for the baby because they don’t know what awkward is. They just want to grow and experience. The same goes for AI. It doesn’t know how to feel awkward about learning new things. It simply accepts the challenge without complaint. That’s one more valuable lesson we can learn from
Artificial intelligence. Editorial Standards Print Reprints & Permissions