Human cognition: The next frontier?

Futureproofing business for the human-AI collaboration Era

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Philippa Leighton-Jones, Senior Vice President, The Trust, WSJ Barrons, speaks:

Vivienne, I think a lot of this conversation has revolved in the past around AI will replace some of the lower skill work. We often think of like there's low skill work, there's high skill work, but you have a different framing.

Can you talk us through that and explain what it means in the context of these workplaces we're talking about? 

Vivienne Ming, Founder and Executive Chair, Socos Labs, speaks:

When we look at what's interesting, AI doesn't care whether it's high skill or low skill. I'm saying it doesn't care what the skill is. And it becomes an economic question. Where's the sweet spot where the cost of the labor is a bottleneck to being able to do something bigger? What's really interesting from our experiments and beyond is a totally different dimension. Is this a well-posed problem?

Well-posed problems are the domains of AIs. They're not always perfect. They can hallucinate. But you can ask it anything, anytime, and it can give you a great answer. Humans are terrible at ill-posed problems. We are terrible with uncertainty and exploring the unknown. We are the only game in town, period.

And where we see those teams, I'm going to call it hybrid intelligence, humans and machines working together, that 5% to 10% that really do something amazing. The dynamic that you see isn't that the AI does the boring stuff and the human does the fun stuff, or the AI does this and that. It's the cyborgs. We can't even tell which of them made the decision. It's totally intertwined. Essentially, the AI is handling the well-posed stuff.

The AI pulls in all the historic trends. It pulls in all the quantitative details. And the human goes out and explores the long tails and asks the questions.

Philippa Leighton-Jones speaks:

The role that private enterprise has in driving R&D in the future and how so often private enterprise has a lot that they can teach government in driving innovation, that requires the kind of originality, the kind of critical thinking that we're hearing about on this panel. How do you preserve that in the future so that you can continue to drive innovation and R&D? 

Jecek Olczak, Group CEO, Philip Morris International, speaks:

Well, this is a really great question because it's so bridged to the education.

But, you know, in the past, education was about give me the, you know, graduates of a good reservoir of knowledge.

And I said, knowledge, you can find it. I want you to have a good technology of thinking. I want you to be a critical thinker. And you mentioned humility, right? There's still this human aspect into this whole thing.

And I don't think there are regulations which actually can drive you to this. And we can regulate the thing from security, safety, et cetera. I mean, on that sort of a perspective, OK, now we complicated the things, I think geopolitics into this whole thing and so on.

But the reality is I need the best performing, sorry, I need the humans with the best performing brains and the brains still on the emotional side and the brains still on the rational side. 

Philippa Leighton-Jones speaks:

Well, let's stay on the education piece because it seems a very fundamental conversation to have. Raj, EY is one of the biggest graduate employees, employers.

You talked about the accounting. You know, we heard in Qatar last month, Tech Live, you know, those kind of like junior analyst jobs, they're gone. Like, it's lawyers, analysts, accountants.

You obviously have a different view. How would you advise a 17, 18 year old thinking about their future career now as they think about this workplace that's probably seeming quite difficult to navigate? 

Raj Sharma, Global Managing Partner, EY, speaks:

I have a thousand technologists or a hundred thousand technologists, sorry, that work for EY.

Back in the day, we used to look at LinkedIn. You have these skills, interview higher. Now I actually look for a different type. How have you used AI to do your work? In engineering, it's OK that you're using AI to generate code. I actually want to see your critical thinking on how you solve the problem. Because irrespective of what this tech company is saying, so even in simple things like programming, what part of the programming chain will I give to an agent? Who determines that? A human has to determine that.

I used to manage five developers before. Now I have to manage two developers and five agents. I still have to aggregate the work to be able to do that. My management skills are very different. I used to train under a manager, used to manage people. I learned from it. Now I'm training you completely differently to be able to do the work that augments your potential at a completely different level.