2023 year-end retrospectives focused heavily on artificial intelligence’s impact and prospects, one year after Chat GPT’s public rollout. Typical was this view from Editor and Publisher, the news media’s most widely read trade publication: “The impact of ChatGPT and generative AI on the job market is a topic of much debate. Professions that involve rules-based tasks or rely heavily on processing large amounts of information, like journalism, law, medicine and architecture, will likely see significant changes. The potential of AI to augment human capabilities is immense, but it also raises questions about the future of these professions.”[1]

In some respects, AI’s arrival in daily business life is simply another milestone in the takeover by machines of humans’ work. In 2000, Duke University spun off its business school’s continuing education program as Duke Corporate Education. As one of the spinoff’s architects described the business model, prerecorded online programs would instruct company managers, executives would receive ample in-person, high-touch attention from faculty, and rising executives would receive mini-camp instruction with limited exposure to real people as instructors.

This mirroring of corporate hierarchies and resource allocation models may make economic sense. Lost in the process though are benefits gained when faculty shape young minds through one-on-one encounters, whether in lecture hall q&a, student conferences and tutorials, or coffee shop conversations. While these losses may not equate to AI failures like self-driving cars that run over pedestrians, the point remains that substituting machines for people can have costs that we overlook in the name of efficiency.

So how important is human interaction, really? Consider the findings of a British study that analyzed professional soccer results in more than 4,000 games played in 11 European nations during Covid-19, when fans were barred from stadium attendance. “With fans present, teams won 0.39 points more per game at home than away. With fans absent, the advantage was almost halved when teams won only 0.22 points more at home than away. With fans present, home teams scored 0.29 goals more per game than away teams. With fans absent, home teams scored just 0.15 goals more than the visitors.

“Furthermore, the lack of crowds affected how referees judged fouls against home and away sides. The data showed: Referees gave more fouls against the home team in empty stadiums. Referees gave a similar number of fouls against the away team in empty stadiums. Referees gave far fewer yellow cards against away teams in empty stadiums. Referees gave similar numbers of yellow cards against the home team in empty stadiums -- even though they fouled more. Red cards followed a similar pattern which was less pronounced, yet still significant.”[2]

One can take these results as an argument either in favor or opposed to machine-intermediated sports performances. The results may be more objectively fair. Yet the games may be less satisfying for players and fans.

In other professional performance realms, the value of one-to-one human engagement remains indisputable. Ask anyone who his or her most influential teacher was and you will have an answer in under a minute. Often it is the teacher who brought the student out of her shell, made math fun, helped the student turn his unruly self into a comedic genius, or otherwise had a transformative effect on the student at an impressionable age.

Similarly, my own and my clients’ experience is that collaborative relationships between patients and medical, surgical and psychiatric professionals significantly improve health outcomes. For contrast, consider the movie “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Nurse Ratched is heartless and controlling in her management of the psychiatric ward. “Your hand is staining my window,” she says dismissively to Jack Nicholson’s character in his first encounter with her across the transom of her nurse’s station. The damage she does to her patients in the movie is so palpable audience members want to cry, scream, or both.

The disability insurance investigator who visited me when I was recuperating from a year-long hospitalization said, as actuaries, he and his colleagues look for four characteristics in a patient recovering from life-threatening illness: quality medical care, support from friends and family, religious faith and the will to live. Take one away, he said, and the patient’s survival chances diminish. Subtract two and it is usually game over, he added. Notably, though he did not say so, all four factors are human-inspired. Machines like a ventilator or a Wound-VAC may be necessary tools. But the human touch is an equally essential condition for survival and recovery.

In my experience as a lawyer, care and concern for clients’ human experience of the situations in which they find themselves is at least as important as technically strong performance by their lawyer. Indeed, the more vulnerable they are to adverse consequences, the more important is one’s empathy for their situation.

Fine arts too are a domain where AI-generated works can be good but not great. Picasso’s “Guernica” could only be created by a person of his imagination and sensibilities. Ditto Rembrandt’s “Return of the Prodigal Son.” In The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming,[3] theologian Henri Nouwen narrates his extended study of the original painting at The Hermitage—sitting in a chair opposite the painting for days at a time, thinking only about the work and the parable it represents.

Nouwen argues only Rembrandt in his last years could have created such a masterpiece, informed not only by the Biblical story but by the artist’s own lifetime loves and losses, including the deaths of his wife and three of their four sons. Nouwen’s work stands equally for the proposition that quality pastoral care by clergy of their congregants is not susceptible to formulaic solutions framed by AI or otherwise.

Our societal experience of new technology is to thrill to the possibilities it opens, only later to be chastened when we recognize its effects are not wholly beneficial to humankind. As we struggle to “get right” the proliferation of AI, we need to remind ourselves, and one another, of the value of human involvement in our life’s work. For as Covid showed us by the examples of bus drivers, hospital orderlies and poultry plant workers, human work is inherently dignified and dignifying, and we should not take it for granted. Happy New Year.

[1] https://www.editorandpublisher.com/stories/ai-101-chatgpt-a-year-of-transforming-our-lives,247038

[2] Dane McCarrick, Merim Bilalic, Nick Neave, Sandy Wolfson. “Home advantage during the COVID-19 pandemic: Analyses of European football leagues,” Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 2021; 56: 102013 DOI: 10.1016/j.psychsport.2021.102013, cited in "Football without the fans: Effect of empty stadiums during pandemic,” ScienceDaily, 13 August 2021, <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/08/210813100323.htm>.

[3] Henri J.M. Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming, New York: Penguin Random House, 1994.