AI: More Automation and Less Empathic Interaction

While examining the potential of AI, McKinsey & Company identifies five important factors to take into consideration: "(1) technical feasibility; (2) costs to automate; (3) relative scarcity, skills, and cost of workers who might otherwise do the activity; (4) benefits (e.g., superior performance) of Automation beyond labor-cost substitution; and (5) regulatory and social-acceptance considerations." Although all of these factors are considered when deploying AI, in this article, we solely focus on the issue of social acceptance. Given all the hype surrounding AI, ML, and Automation in general, it's important to take a step back and consider which tasks, if any, can only be done by humans. No matter how many data points we enter into a Machine Learning platform, there is a certain type of intelligence that is uniquely human. In a New York Times op-ed piece, MIT professor and Psychologist Sherry Turkle wrote, "Technologists presented us with Artificial Intelligence, and in the end, it made us look differently, and more critically, at the kind of intelligence that only people have."