Community — What AI May Never Replace
Going Backward to Drive Our Species Forward
Every day, I hear another story about how artificial intelligence (AI) has been able to complete a complex human task much faster and better than we could ever imagine.
Whether it’s beating the top players in the world at certain board games like Go and Chess, or doing writing (ChatGPT), videography (Sora), and coding tasks (Devin AI) in a fraction of the time it takes us humans. It’s easy to fall into this trap of news headlines about the doomsday of AI approaching, where all the jobs we currently have will be entirely replaced.
But amidst all these awe-inspiring feats that would make our ancestors roll in their graves, there remains a fundamental aspect of human society that AI can’t yet replicate; community.
How do we define community?
It’s so much more than just a collection of people who are in the same physical space (with common interests). Ever since the dawn of our species, we knew that we weren’t the strongest, the fastest, or the biggest animals in the wild. For us to survive, we needed to our brains and surround ourselves with a community of people who had similar goals.
That deeper level of connection is what has always made us human. The sense of belonging, the shared identity, the mutual support we get from others, regardless of proximity or similarities. Back then, community meant hunting together, sitting around the campfire, and building shelters to help house the village. Today, despite all the advances in science, technology, and the social sector, the sense of community is still what brings us together. It’s the soccer teams we play for with our friends, the robotics clubs we join at school, the FaceTime calls we have with family on the other side of the world, and so much more.
Communities can take so many different forms, from physical to virtual, and from a small neighbourhood gathering to a worldwide event. Bringing a sense of unity amidst the diversity in our world is what community-building is all about.
Where AI falls short
In my experience so far, I’ve worked in many environments that focus on technological innovation and social growth/community-building. These programs include The Knowlege Society (TKS) where I was a student, and the Smart Waterloo Region Innovation Lab (SWRIL) where I work for my co-op term.
In my life, I’ve been part of many community types too, having played team sports my entire life, being very involved in school clubs, meeting like-minded people for self-development, and even the hospital community I deeply connected with while going through cancer treatment as a teen.
From all these life experience I’ve had, I believe that what brought us together as a species 1,000 years ago is what will still connect us 1,000 years from now. These are a few standout reasons why our uniquely human experience of our communities will be hard to replace with AI:
Emotional Intelligence
Humans are uniquely able to empathize, understand nuances in communication, and provide genuine support to one another. Having this intelligence helps build trust and resolve conflicts that can form meaningful relationships. While AI can analyze data and generate responses based on patterns and training data, understanding the emotional context of human interactions is a completely different challenge.
When going through cancer treatment, there were some very vulnerable and stressful moments along the journey where the human connection with other patients, families, and medical staff helped me get through my issues. Having a compassionate person listening to what is in your heart to provide comfort is something that would be much trickier to do with AI. If ChatGPT existed back then and I used it as my go-to to talk through some issues I had, I’m sure it wouldn’t have created the same emotional connection that it would to talk with someone who shared a similar path.
Innovation through Creativity
Making connecting between seemingly unrelated concepts, even for human beings, is a difficult task. For AI, which often relies on making connections between existing data sets and predefined algorithms, true creativity is limited. In the human world, collaboration is an essential way that we can build off each others’ various strengths, ways of thinking, and areas of expertise to create new ideas/insights.
In the work we do at SWRIL, a lot of the social innovation process involves brainstorming sessions with community members to explore ways to solve pressing local issues. Engaging in discussions and ideation sessions with youth who have faced these issues in many different contexts helps them bounce ideas off each other to generate innovative solutions. AI-driven tools, on the other hand, may not as easily develop these out-of-the-box ideas as they may not have the personal experiences of these community members in their data sets from which they recommend solutions. The synergy of human collaboration is often where the magic truly happens.
Authenticity
Having the ability to trust one another is an essential aspect of human communities. In our ancestral days, trust is what made us let other people into our tribe, knowing that they wouldn’t stab us in the back (literally). Expressing our thoughts and values in an open, honest way is what we do today to help us connect with our closest family members, friends, and even people we know online. AI cannot currently convey genuine emotions and understand complex social cues that make us human beings feel a sense of trust and authenticity.
If I were a student again in TKS or SWRIL, developing a sense of trust with my program leader would be one of my top priorities. We often take action on the advice that others give because we trust that they’re coming from a place of authenticity to bring a message that is tailored to our specific needs. Comparatively, an AI-powered system would respond to questions more generally based on holistic information that may not connect as much with the reader compared to human-to-human interactions.
Adaptability
Communities are very dynamic systems that change over time based on evolving challenges and needs. Being able to adapt to changing conditions by being flexible is essential for our species to survive and thrive. Being able to quickly move shelters once a natural disaster hits is what helped those before us survive, and being able to adapt to our ever-changing world helps us thrive in business, health, and our personal lives today. AI may struggle to respond effectively to unforeseen situations and consider all the different variables required to make agile decisions.
I see this a lot with sports, and especially as a huge baseball fan my entire life. It has become a game that is so centred on analytics and statistics that the sport itself is dying off into irrelevancy, falling from the status it once had as America’s favourite pastime. Sure, the numbers might say to not let a pitcher face a certain hitter for the 3rd straight time in the batting order. But if a pitcher is throwing the game of his life, there needs to be some human intervention that understands how momentum and being “in the zone” can impact performance. Decisions like these where the analytics were trusted more than the feel of the game have honestly cost some teams a chance at the World Series.
What our AI Future Holds
I absolutely agree that AI is an excellent tool that can help improve so many areas of our lives. Even in the sense of community-building, it can help enhance the ways that we connect and make decisions.
But at the same time, there are still many uniquely human elements to our biology, despite how much AI has already taken over. And who knows, I might be completely wrong about this in 20, 50, or 100 years when we’re able to better connect with AI than we are with other people. I mean in a sense, it’s already happening with how much time we spend on our phones.
While AI has many impressive abilities, it doesn’t seem like our lives will be fully replaced by them anytime soon. The heart of human connections in communities separates us from efficiency-centred AI technologies.
As we all try to navigate this new world, where innovations keep spawning into the tech market at warp speed, it’s important to still remember the value we uniquely provide to each other. By using technology as a tool to enhance, instead of replacing human interaction, we can create stronger, more resilient communities!
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