Prediction

Last week, I attended the OpenAI Community Meeting about higher education. The room was full of educators and administrators who were working on figuring out how to adjust to the AI revolution in the classroom. Chatbots are very good at doing homework, fast. How do they evaluate, integrate, and utilize AI without bypassing the process of teaching and learning?

I have been happily employing AI most days to help with one task or another. It seems to have all the answers, patiently. It will walk down any road I suggest. It is a great thought partner and research assistant.

But there are things missing from a disembodied intelligence. It is impossible to know who you are talking to when you work with someone remotely. I was working with a remote social media team. Every communication was perfect. They seemed to get me and what I was after. But the work product wasn’t so responsive. Things I didn’t like were not getting fixed. Then it dawned on me…I wasn’t speaking with a human. I was speaking to chat. Chat GPT understood me perfectly and was giving me the exact response I wanted. The people doing the work- I had no idea if they understood my feedback at all.

My new impulse. Hire someone who will come to my office and work with me in person. If I need to trust people, I need to see them with my naked eye.

Due to this and other challenges, in-person, in-body, in-conversation interactions are going to become more valuable. Everything that can be done by formula will be done by AI. All those jobs are disappearing already. But jobs that require trust and resonance will be done in person.

The stronger the disembodied intelligence becomes, the stronger the embodied intelligence will need to be. As an embodiment teacher, I will continue to develop my work with wisdom that rises from the body. Ask the body, it knows.