How to stay ahead of the curve in the age of AI: Be more human

We will need to rediscover skills innate to humans that risk being lost as AI starts doing our tasks

- JASPREET BINDRA

Last weekend belonged to Manus, a Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) super-agent that can reportedly handle up to 50 complex tasks simultaneously. Videos of it managing transactions while deep researching another topic and autonomously launching websites, while also planning your dream vacation, took over the internet. This would make OpenAI and other frontier AI labs fret, but more significantly, it will cause heartburn among humans as we wonder whether AI is already superior to us. Parmy Olson recently wrote about a Microsoft-CMU study (bit.ly/3DeKTzC) of 319 knowledge workers on how they worked with AI. A startling result was that as they started trusting AI with skills such as writing, analysis and evaluation, they practiced those skills less themselves: "They self-reported an atrophy of those skills." It led to their accepting whatever output GenAI gave them, with minimal or no checking.