AI & Soft Skills

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When it comes to using ChatGPT at work, some business leaders believe that soft skills will be crucial in the age of AI. Earlier this month, Aneesh Raman, a vice president at LinkedIn, said that communication, creativity, and flexibility are skills that will set employees apart in the workforce as opposed to technical skills like coding. Perhaps doubling down on what makes you human may be what saves you from being replaced by AI. -Aaron Mok

Something AI is good at—and something it's not

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“Studies this year of ChatGPT in legal analysis and white-collar writing chores have found that the bot helps lower-performing people more than it does the most skilled. On a task that required reasoning based on evidence, however, ChatGPT was not helpful at all. Here, ChatGPT lulled employees into trusting it too much. Unaided humans had the correct answer 85 percent of the time. People who used ChatGPT without training scored just over 70 percent. Those who had been trained did even worse, getting the answer only 60 percent of the time. In interviews conducted after the experiment, “people told us they neglected to check because it’s so polished, it looks so right.’”

Read more in The New York Times

Turning happiness into a management tool

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A large American health-care provider, Ochsner Health System, introduced a rule that workers must make eye contact and smile whenever they walk within ten feet of another person in the hospital. Pret A Manger sends in mystery shoppers to visit every outlet regularly to see if they are greeted with the requisite degree of joy. Pass the test and the entire staff gets a bonus—a powerful incentive for workers to turn themselves into happiness police. Companies have a right to ask their employees to be polite when they deal with members of the public. They do not have a right to try to regulate their workers’ psychological states and turn happiness into an instrument of corporate control.

Companies would be much better off forgetting wishy-washy goals like encouraging contentment. They should concentrate on eliminating specific annoyances, such as time-wasting meetings and pointless memos. Instead, they are likely to develop ever more sophisticated ways of measuring the emotional state of their employees. Academics are already busy creating smartphone apps that help people keep track of their moods, such as Track Your Happiness and Moodscope. It may not be long before human-resource departments start measuring workplace euphoria via apps, cameras and voice recorders.

Schumpeter in The Economist

Career Choices

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Find what you are good at. Find what you have a passion for doing. People will pay you good money to do the things that fit within both circles. No one will be willing to pay for your "C minus" work (or not very much). So forget about bringing your "fours" up to "sixes" (on a scale of one to ten). Focus on getting your "eights "up to "nines" and your "nines" up to "tens." (A bit of an oversimplification but you get the idea).

Stephen Goforth

A Human/AI Blend isn't Always The Best Option

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A new study “recruited management consultants from Boston Consulting Group.” One of the tasks was to brainstorm about a new type of shoe, sketch a persuasive business plan for making it and write about it persuasively. Some researchers had believed only humans could perform such creative tasks. They were wrong. The consultants who used ChatGPT produced work that independent evaluators rated about 40 percent better on average. In fact, people who simply cut and pasted ChatGPT’s output were rated more highly than colleagues who blended its work with their own thoughts. And the A.I.-assisted consultants were more than 20 percent faster.

Read more in The New York Times

16 Articles about AI & Health Care

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19 Articles about Data Science & AI from Nov 2023

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9 Articles about Lawyers Using AI

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14 Articles about AI & the US Military

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Selling the Problem

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Most managers and leaders put 10 percent of their energy into selling the problem and 90 percent into selling the solution to the problem. People aren't in the market for solutions to problems they don't see, acknowledge and understand. They might even come up with a better solution than yours. Then you won't have to sell it, the solution will be theirs.

William Bridges, Managing Transitions

13 Articles about AI in Court

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11 Articles about AI for those leading Companies  

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9 Articles about the Business of Running an AI

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Crashing through Barriers

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Why do you think Matthew started his Gospel with a boring list of so-and-so begat so-and-so? Consider just the women mentioned in this genealogy. There are four of them before you get to Mary. Matthew introduces their glorious Messiah.. as descending from two harlots, one born out of incest and an adulterous. They are the only four ladies mentioned in the genealogy other than Mary.

He came crashing through the barriers that said, “You have to be born spiritually out of the ‘right kind’ of people.”

And today, he comes crashing through barriers you’ve erected, too. The barriers that place God in a nice comfortable corner where you can keep an eye on him. He breaks down those excuses that say, “God, you can’t use me. You can’t love me. I’m a sinner.”

God built a monument to grace on that genealogy. That’s why you shouldn’t shy away from admitting your past for what it was. It can be a monument to God’s grace in our lives. That’s when God can use us the most- when we realize who we are, where we come from, and how much our lives are dependent on God's grace—on receiving it and giving it to others.

Don’t hide from the past and pretend it didn’t happen. By admitting who we are and acknowledging how God completely changes us, he can bring us further than he could otherwise and use us more.. just like those people in the genealogy.

You stack up a row of harlots and liars and murderers and cheaters, and what do you have? You have Jesus. That’s the way God works.

Stephen Goforth