Why judgement matters more as AI advances

In a recent interview with The Economist, Elon Musk said AI is already better than 90% of professional software engineers at writing code. That claim can be extended to many other areas that we humans work in. It raises a real question: Does this development require us to grow in other areas, or can we lean back and let AI reason and decide for us?

As AI advances, the need to retain our own clarity only grows. I believe clarity can be strengthened through active self-leadership and deeper interactions with other people.

Your personal judgement is one area that will require ongoing training and development. AI can provide you with all the information you can dream of and it can also suggest what you should do. Have you noticed how the recent models are also getting better at swaying you in one direction or another? It can be very tempting to just give in and take the suggestion given to you. It is, however, still the responsibility of each individually to carefully exercise judgement on what to do.

AI is already so advanced that it can make better generic decisions than me on many topics. That development will only continue and eventually encompass all decisions in life. What is still important is that I make my decisions in accordance with what is right for me intellectually and emotionally. Not based on what others might have done or what the likelihood of a given outcome is. How do you choose correctly while sailing an ocean of information and suggestions?

When you are clear you can make good use of information and suggestions on how to decide. Clarity comes from time to reflect, time to feel as well as conversations with people who can pick up on tone of voice, the pauses you make as well as what was talked about months earlier. Executive coaching is a useful space to create clarity and hear what you need to hear and not just what you like to hear. Over the years, I have worked with meditation, mindfulness and coaching to build and protect my own clarity. My clarity helped me with an important personal decision where an AI model would have suggested a less radical decision.  

I lived in Hong Kong before relocating to Germany. In the summer of 2017, I spent six weeks in Europe together with a person I had recently met. Upon my return to Hong Kong I pondered how to approach the relationship. The decision was clear to me. There was no time to waste. I should right away relocate to Germany and we should move in together. My clarity told me that I had to go all in. Four weeks later I had sold everything in Hong Kong. I was picked up at Düsseldorf airport and we moved in together. That is now nine years ago. We are still together and that decision has been one of the best in my life.

AI should be embraced as a tool to pick up and use. Our task as humans is to do exactly that and not let the abundance of information and possible decisions steer us off course. Without cultivating our personal judgment there is a good chance that we simply grab one of the decisions offered instead of the one that on a deeper level resonates both intellectually and emotionally with us. Use of mindfulness as well as human interaction through executive coaching plays an even more important role in the age of AI advancement.

AI was used to support sentence structure and editorial refinement.

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