Skills Needed in an AI-Driven World

0:00people are the most consequential and dangerous forces on earth well personality psychology is about the nature of human nature it's about people and wouldn't that be useful to know it seems to me i can't i can't think of a more important problem you're listening to the science of personality podcast brought to you by hogan assessments the global leader in personality and leadership guided by your hosts hogan chief science officer and world-renowned personality psychologist dr ryan sherman alongside hogan's pr manager and

0:35resident storyteller blake lepp this podcast explores the impact of personality on life leadership and the nature of human nature hello everyone and welcome to the science of personality podcast i'm your host ryan sherman along with my co-host as always blake lepp say hello blake hello everybody and welcome back to the science of personality podcast episode 145 today ryan and i are going to talk about a topic that is one of the top headlines in the media today and isn't going anywhere in the foreseeable future

1:10and that is with the exponential proliferation of artificial intelligence and its impact on the global workforce what skills will humans need to remain relevant and employed opinions vary on what that impact will look like some think ai is coming for all of our jobs and will sooner rather than later deem human workers unnecessary others think we're on the verge of an ai bubble and the technology is starting to plateau and then there's the rest of us who realistically or at least optimistically

1:40see a future somewhere in between because of ryan's status as a premier thought leader in workplace personality psychology he has plenty of thoughts on the matter and that's what we're going to discuss today but before we get to our conversation if you wish to give us any ideas for upcoming episodes or you want to ask ryan or me a question shoot us an email at hello at the science of personality.com or follow the science of personality on linkedin now let's get to it okay ryan this is one that i mean

2:12i've been wanting to talk about this and the more and more you see it in the news i think like i mentioned in the in the intro you know this is just a topic that we had to get to and you know with that let's just let's start this off with a little temperature check how worried should people be about ai coming for their jobs yeah well that's a big one right out the gate like uh look um my position on this i would say is uh has has been flex uh fluctuating uh quite a bit so uh not so long ago i would have said ah not

2:47really you know there there's no intelligence in artificial intelligence there's no sort of intelligence there there are things that generative ai can do and that are really helpful and can help people in the workplace uh but it didn't seem like you know it seemed like some jobs are going to be probably be maybe eliminated or replaced or at least uh enhanced by by generative artificial intelligence but the the recent rise of a genic artificial intelligence which we could talk about the differences between those uh if we want to uh is has has sort of raised my radar a little bit right

3:26so now we're gonna wait well wait a minute maybe there's more impact than than i originally thought here and i think what what we're gonna actually see and you know maybe this is airing too much in the in the other direction is i think we're gonna see actually quite a few jobs um replaced by by artificial intelligence or at least uh substantially changed by artificial intelligence again the the the rise of a genic ai is a big deal so for those of you who are saying well what's the difference between

3:56isn't all ai the same well to some extent yes but the big difference is with with generative ai like things like chat gpt or or claude these kinds of things can generate text generate words they can they can add content right they kind of create content so there were some sort of threats around that for content creators for writers for uh screenwriters uh you know comedians all kinds of people who work in the sort of content creation space are concerned about about this artist right we've seen it with

4:29with um with with visual uh ai as well but a genic ai is quite different a genic ai is the equivalent of creating someone else to go run your computer for you and they can do anything that you could do on a computer so you could create a genic ai bots to or ai agents who can can go do a whole variety of tasks like let's say let's say blake you and i wanted to do some marketing for this podcast we could say we could build a an a genic ai we could say hey here's the podcast go

5:04listen to all of our episodes which it could go do and just a matter of a few minutes and then we could say now based on that we want you to do some advertising for us go find the best places for us to advertise this podcast given the content uh then go find the prices right and go find where we can get the best return on investment here's the credit card blake we'll use your credit card in this case uh and go purchase it go purchase the ad and you know what we want you to run a b testing too so we

5:36do you do two different kinds of ads go build the materials go do all that stuff and you and i can just sit back and let that happen and we can just watch the results come in that's just one example of what can be done i think there are lots of other things we're seeing with a genic ai in terms of possibilities again all this is a little bit hypothetical at this point it seems very possible but it hasn't gone into effect in many places yet i think about air traffic controllers it's one of the most difficult

6:07jobs in the world to do it's it's incredibly taxing in terms of the the sort of cognitive workload that people have we do know that there's a shortage there has been a shortage of air traffic controllers in the united states for a number of years now this seems like the kind of job an ai agent could do right so it's not just i mean the big the big thing we see people talking about today blake is ai agents for coding that's the place where it's sort of all has really started really kicked off is oh we're going to replace developers we're going to replace people who can do coding with ai agents

6:40the ai agents can go write the code and that there does seem to be that does seem to be happening we've seen some organizations some big companies make layoffs that seem to be associated with with using a genic ai to do a lot more of their coding but i think there's there's applications in the physical spaces as well for a decade now we've been talking about the self-driving car and there's been lots of advances in that but now we're talking about the degree to which driving a car is like running a computer an ai agent can drive your car an ai agent can fly your

7:16airplane again to the degree to which flying an airplane is is like running a computer anything that can be done on a computer an ai agent could go do you could train the agent to go do that thing and so i think we're really just starting to hit the tip of the iceberg here on what all is possible for these ai agents and i think it's going to have a pretty dramatic impact on on people's jobs in the workforce now how many jobs are going to go away where which ones where they'd be replaced by what

7:48will people do instead i think there's a lot of big questions that are still yet to be answered i do think there is a place for expertise in all of this you're still going to need experts at some level to evaluate what the ai agents are doing or at least to provide the ai agents with a set of instructions that you want them to follow but i i wonder blake how far can we take this right if i can have an ai agent do my customer service and do my accounting and do my marketing can't i just tell an ai agent to run my entire business what would that look like i don't know uh so i think there

8:25uh uh my temperature has risen on this a little bit uh i i don't quite know uh if that's uh totally reflected in reality or if uh i still haven't risen my temperature enough i think that's one of the the interesting things about it and kind of one of the more i mean i guess i don't want i don't want to say scary but it's that we can we can foresee all these potential scenarios but yet i don't really

8:57feel like anybody necessarily has all the answers yet and that's where that's where i think people that's where that's what alarms people maybe keep some people up at night yeah for sure you know and and you mentioned you know the expertise earlier because up until just recently knowledge and expertise were humans key differentiators you know but now ai essentially can possess a lot of that knowledge and can process it and access it almost instantly so what are some of the advantages that

9:29people might still have in order to stay relevant in a world that is is being uh is shifting more towards ai yeah i i think that's what i've been thinking about is exactly these kinds of things blake is like okay well what can can people still do right um it is really interesting one of my colleagues here at hogan is fond of saying you know with artificial intelligence there is no intelligence it's not intelligent it's just it's just reproducing things that it thinks you want right it's just again

10:00guessing as to what comes next right but it's really interesting if i think about that right let's let me you know i know i know you're a marketing guy so my goal here is not to pick on marketing as an example but if you go back to that marketing example that i came up with um to what degree is there intelligence inside the human we might ask ourselves too if we say hey if right if i told my marketing department that i want them to go do those things of course they they would just you know they would go do those things right the same way an ai would uh an ai agent would

10:35and so it is to me it's a really interesting to think about what actually counts as intelligence so that comes to you know your question here about what are these sorts of things that humans have that differentiates us well you know a couple of things one is uh certainly that this sort of philosophical point of view on uh agency like what counts as you know being an active agent in your environment right so i think that that's one thing that we have to really contend with as humans

11:08but i also think in a sort of more practical and applied sense for thinking about what is it that i can offer to my job or to my work or what kind of value can i provide i think one of the biggest things we're going to see in terms of skills and this is one that people have talked about for a while but we're going to see it uh exponentially grow in terms of importance is um is critical thinking right so can we think critically uh about what we're telling our ai agents to do what the results

11:39that our ai agents produce are these the things we want is this accurate is this um of value that that we're that we're looking for i think those kinds of skills are going to be important i think we're going to see an increase in judgment and decision making because certainly you can have ai agents make certain kinds of decisions for you but ultimately the rules that you're putting in place for these agents are based on your judgment and your decision making preferences your risk tolerance for example so i think that our style for making decisions and our accuracy at making decisions is going

12:17to be more and more important so those kinds of skills i think are the big things we're going to see it's really interesting when i think about interpersonal skills because that's one thing that certainly humans have that ai still to some extent struggles with it can almost sort of pretend to have interpersonal skills to some degree but it also misses in some certain areas um that you can see lots of examples of ai sort of you know making kinds of mistakes that are sort of interpersonal skill kind of mistakes right and i don't know to what extent those interpersonal skills are going to be

12:51really valuable right right now they're really valuable in the workplace but if we're just working with ai agents in fact advice around talking with ai agents is to to not be that nice or polite to them don't say oh great thanks so much for that like you would to a human who helped you with something because that just costs more energy and the ai agents don't care they don't need your gratitude they don't need right uh you to tell them that you appreciate the work that they're that you're doing so um interpersonal skills is sort of a question mark for me but i certainly think critical thinking

13:26i think judgment i particularly around ethical decision making blake because there are some problems that ai struggles with on an ethical sort of uh basis right it doesn't understand well what's the right ethical approach to use here and i think that's where human expertise and so that's what we were talking i was mentioning here about sort of philosophically right thinking about these sort of bigger issues what counts as agency to some extent uh the extent to which ai agents solve lots of

14:02everyday work problems it's going to create an actually a need sort of shockingly enough for a profession that's largely disappeared which is the profession of philosopher right of thinking about these critical big ethical and moral issues and how to resolve them well it's very interesting it's also it's quite strange you know the we're recording this on on friday march 6 on a the day that i think that the february uh job statistics came out and and showed a a pretty um dramatic and kind of

14:40unforeseen decrease in jobs um produced in the month of february um a lot of people speculating that ai might have something to do with that so just kind of this the timing of this is interesting um based on well go ahead yeah no no blake i certainly think that that's that that's there's some correct intuition there that uh if companies aren't already replacing people with ai they're at least thinking about it right so maybe they're a little slow to go higher until they're they feel more

15:15confident yeah well let's dig a little deeper and focus a little bit more on what we do at hogan and that's to to take a look at personalities more specifically and what personality characteristics do you think you know digging in a little bit more than you know in past we'll talk more about judgment and and critical thinking and hear it just a little bit but um those personality characteristics that will be the most valuable in an ai driven workplace and kind of what we can see and measure

15:47um from a hogan point of view yeah well certainly one that stands out to me that is going to increase in value in this sort of ai driven workplace is going to actually be learning approach which is pretty unique to our assessments there aren't many most big five assessments don't capture what we capture with learning approach but this is propensity and the desire to continue learning don't you just want to get better uh at learning to learn more stuff to learn more information and i think in an ai

16:17driven workplace it's going to be essential it's going to be essential to be constantly learning what other techniques can i use how else can i creatively think about and that's another term that i would say is creativity which is shows up under inquisitiveness or in the big five framework openness to experience these kind of things i think are going to be even more important uh you might say well wait a minute can't i thought you were just saying ai agents can replace things like uh artists right that are sort of creating new work but i actually think the having the imagination and the creativity to figure

16:52out how to use these agents how can we get value out of these agents in ways that we haven't thought about is going to be really critical i mean everybody can use chat gbt and sort of the simple ways that people know about it but i think there's lots of creative ways that we can use these newly forthcoming ai agents to do all kinds of tasks that we really haven't thought of so when i said we're just at the tip of the iceberg i think there's lots of ideas that remain out there and i think people who are high on learning approach people who are high on inquisitive are going to be the ones

17:25that have these ideas and are willing to continue learning continue pushing their knowledge forward to be able to apply these to to new situations okay here's a little follow-up that i kind of just was thinking about as you were talking about learning approach and inquisitive i'm also thinking about this from like if you think about teams and wanting to have kind of a well-balanced team so what that might look like and what the way i'm thinking about it is you you definitely want those people you want some of those people with uh high conscientiousness

18:01you know or that high prudence but then you also kind of want some people maybe who are looking at a different lens whenever you bring up inquisitive you know what i see a lot in some of the feedbacks i do is and it's they're not me it's not it's not always like this i mean i'm not trying to say that every profile looks like this like but you do see a lot if someone is really high on inquisitive they may be lower on prudence that that's or vice versa and in my mind i would think that

18:33an ai agent would have that conscientiousness kind of built in so would it be someone for lower conscientiousness be a good fit with an ai agent to balance out the team yeah it's a really good question and and to some extent i agree with you that it seems like an ai agent can resolve a lot of prudence issues right an ai agent can keep track of your calendar keep everything organized summarize key objectives that you need to get done at the end of the day right

19:07you know right now you can open up things like microsoft copilot and if it's working with your with your organization and your outlook in your inbox and those kinds of things you can just ask it hey what are the most critical tasks i need to get done today and it will review your emails and say hey these are probably the most important things you should work on today so to some extent prudence is going to be less valuable in in this in this kind of uh agentic ai world and these sort of creativity kind of things are going to be more valuable uh so yeah yeah i think i you know to me

19:43that that's one of the ways that we're going to see things happen but i also don't know what the implication are for teams because i do think as part of our teams we're going to include ai agents as part of our teams there are other things that to me are clearly coming uh some places have already adopted them and for example uh ai based performance reviews right so okay you could do that right now you might say well i need to write a performance review for this person so i could go to chat gbt

20:13and i could say uh here's this thing this person's done this year here's what they've accomplished here help me right and it can help you turn that into a text for a performance review but that's not what i'm talking about what i'm talking about is an ai agent that looks at all the stuff you've done right here at hogan we use microsoft so we have microsoft teams we have microsoft outlook you have uh you know your calendars your meetings all of these these kinds of things i could imagine saying hey ai give this person a performance review you know all the calls they were on you

20:46know all the meetings they took you know how the emails they sent you know all the teams messages they sent you know the kind of stuff that they were working on now maybe not everything maybe there's things that you've gone out and done and other places that aren't picked up by your computer so well but that's coming right it may not be here at hogan but certainly some organizations we are going to see this ai based performance review come now some of the research that i was just asked to comment on recently as you know blake was about how people react to ai based performance reviews and

21:18it turns out people actually prefer ai based performance reviews over human reviews they they think that those are better reviews that they gave them more critical feedback more useful feedback more steps for getting ahead until they find out that their performance review came from an ai at which point yeah right which is amazing at which point it completely falls apart they just go oh i don't you know i i don't i don't like this performance review at all i thought you know so there's this really

21:50interesting phenomena here where we want our feedback to come from a human we think that the ai misses important nuance of our work yet when we don't know that it's from ai the data suggests that it actually improves proves proves improves performance more so i think this is an interesting conundrum for organizations to deal with and uh you know i i think um this ai based performance review might be something that just becomes natural in the future uh that it's just part of part of our everyday life

22:26wow i had not even thought about that because part of me is thinking okay if i know okay maybe i i see this review and and they give me the critical feedback and i and then i find out that it's ai it's like okay a i'm getting good feedback because it knows the ins and outs of what i'm doing and and and can potentially even be more honest than a human being assessing my performance but then i also know that my boss maybe maybe i'm like okay well this is easier because then i don't have to

23:03have hard feelings necessarily towards my boss right so to me that's how i would kind of react but i can see your point and maybe i'm just kind of the anomaly there um but but that's that's really interesting i mean i think it has the advantages of objectivity right to some extent but it has the disadvantages that i think is accurate to say that it might miss nuance of what somebody brings to the workplace interesting okay so my next question you know and and i'll even i'll even tell the audience

23:34that would you know whatever we were going over these questions that that you this is one that you you wanted to give a little bit more thoughts i'm curious to what you came up with and that's you know what about the dark side personality characteristics that might hinder one's ability to adapt to this new ai work environment you know what might get in our way did you did you think of anything or or what what came to mind yeah i mean a few things that show up when i think about what kind of dark side personality characteristics might hinder our ability so on the one hand i do think

24:04actually some more managed imaginativeness might be beneficial right for the same reasons we talked about with some sort of curiosity and innovation uh on the other hand i i wonder about um the sort of uh unwillingness to adopt these new frameworks i think that's probably going to be the biggest i think again it's very tricky on the one hand you don't want to go adopt these things if they're not really ready to go yet right if an agentic ai can't really right if an agentic ai can't fly an airplane and

24:39land an airplane we sure as hell don't want them flying airplanes right but on the other hand if we're slow to adopt right so i was talking with some people about this uh last week blake i was saying hey like look at this stuff that's coming i mean this is pretty wild what's happening how this is going to change and and somebody said well our governments our governments need to step in and they need to stop this okay well you can do that and organizations can do that too an organization can say we're not going to do this right this might be something you might consider to be maybe a high

25:11cautious kind of behavior right no we're not going to do this because we're we think it's too dangerous we think it's going to hurt people's jobs people need those jobs we're not going to do this okay well what's going to happen when your competitor does what's going to happen to the country who says we're not going to adopt this but other countries are in my view they're going to fall well behind and they're going to fall behind in terms of productivity they're going to fall behind in terms of output and so i think ultimately it's sort of inevitable so when i think about the dark side

25:42characteristics that are actually going to hurt people's ability to adapt to this i do think about things like cautious on the other hand i think you can go too far in the other direction i do think you can say you know we're going to adopt this stuff too quickly and it's going to get us into a lot of trouble um but i i do i do have concerns about high cautious in this new environment because um because it's coming and i think i think we need to be prepared for it well yeah the cautious thing

26:13make it just well i don't even know if it's cautious that did this but whatever the way you were talking and framing some of that i was thinking of like the blockbuster you know what what killed blockbuster in the streaming wars and all that and i what would that what would that dark side character almost like is it is it leisurely or yeah that's right to some extent it's not just cautious right it's not like cautious is in part large part about sort of a fear of public embarrassment right it's not so much

26:49you know afraid to make a mistake um but you can sort of still see that with you know again i think about in on the mvpi right high security right but i think yeah you're right with leisurely as well right so these kinds of things it's mostly what i see as potential risks are those really high moving against scores uh which is a lot of time is sort of that or sorry i said moving against i meant moving away apologies uh moving away scores because that's really more of the sort of fear-driven approach

27:23we're afraid of what this change might look like and so we're going to avoid it in some ways we're going to run away from it so i think that entire sort of set of scales could be uh you know uh not the characteristics you'd want to have in an ai driven world okay so we talked uh a little bit you know in the i think it was the the first or second question i asked and judgment came up was one of the things and so let's dig in a little deeper on the role that human judgment does play in all this

27:56and i'm asking this question because there was something in the news lately and i i don't want to i want our listeners to realize i don't i don't have the article up i just i you know i hear these things all you know on podcasts and and one of these was that uh somebody ran uh these ai engines through some war simulations and nuclear warheads were launched in something like 90 to 95 percent of the scenarios that they they you know put through these ai engines so don't you think a human judgment

28:31should still matter if that's truly where ai might take us i mean look at the situations we're in today i mean we're having a global conflict you know we don't need to get on either side of that and you know discuss that but what if ai was in charge you know what what's get what's your take on this yeah well so a couple of things about this so so first uh i did i did read news article and it was similar to what you said 90 something percent of these scenarios ai decided to use nuclear options

29:02uh it and again according to the news article that i read it said that it you know the researcher was saying things like um that the ai would say well they'll either submit or they will or or we'll all die together right it sort of took this ultimatum kind of approach uh the thing is that i don't quite know what that means right uh did an ai launch a nuclear missile no an ai said that this was the

29:33option that should go do but it was these are i think most of these are sort of generative ai things not a genic ai but it does leave the warning towards a genic ai didn't if a genic ai would say hey this is the right decision this is the thing to go do um you do wonder you know just how much authority do we want these to have i will say this that the people who are using these ai agents typically the people that i know who've gone to do this buy a separate computer to run them on because they're so concerned about what they're going to do they have to have access to the internet

30:05obviously to do all kinds of things but they don't even want to put them on their really their truly their own personal computer they buy a separate personal computer and have the ai agent run things because they don't know what it's going to do and so i think yes there absolutely is a significant risk to having ai agents making these kind of decisions and this is where human judgment this is why i do think human judgment is going to be even more important in the future but i also wonder about this particular scenario like i don't know the you know the context and the details of how it

30:39decided to do this it of course brings memories for those of us that are our age and older blake of the the movie uh war games i believe that was the name of the movie right yeah matthew broderick yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah where uh you know the computer was you know designed first to play tic-tac-toe and then later on played a game called thermonuclear war if i have if i'm remembering that correctly uh and the computer would play itself in this game many many many many times that was sort of well i'm spoiling the movie from 40 something i think we're safe to talk about it now uh would

31:16play but they set the computer up to play itself many many times and so that it would learn that oh wow no matter what happens in thermonuclear war everybody loses no matter how you play the game and ultimately the computer learned that the only the best way to play was to not play at all right and so i wonder you know you know just how much training would an ai need to to take that sort of approach i don't know um but absolutely it seems clear to me the human judgment is really important a second comment i want to make about that blake is that you know when i've talked about the

31:48the applications of a genic ai again the initial applications were all in this sort of what i would call mental world right of non-physical kinds of objects it's you know it's right it's like writing code writing software right things that sort of exist mentally not not in a physical kind of capacity but then we're seeing more and more potential applications in a physical capacity i've already given you some but another physical capacity when i think about imagine you just have a camera on your

32:20stock room at your store or you just take a photo of your stock room periodically and an ai agent just goes and orders what you need right oh you're running low on this let's go and just and it buys it and it just goes directly to your supplier buys it gets it shipped to you you'll probably need somebody to unload it and put it in your store room but right that sort of automation of these kinds of things i think is very doable and one clear place where i'll guarantee you it is being

32:51applied i have no insider knowledge on this but i would be absolutely stunned if it were not being applied it's in warfare there is no doubt in my mind that ai agents are being used this ai technology is being used to identify potential targets potential threats and to advise and guide military personnel in terms of their tactics on any given scenario on how to respond and perhaps even to some extent ai are

33:25making the call on certain things i again i don't have any particular insider detail but given the stakes involved in military operations there's no doubt in my mind that this technology is not being used well this is where it's kind of another interesting thing because i am a bit of a news junkie and and again i want to stress that we're not we're not presenting opinions or anything

33:56here i'm just going based on the news reporting that i saw and given the the recent conflict that that we're dealing with right now we don't need to discuss it but there was there was one particularly um um tragic event that occurred and again if you're paying attention you all know what i'm talking about but i don't want to get into the details but there there's concern that maybe ai was being used but ai was trying to assess where the threat was but potentially might have been doing that

34:32based on um looking at an old map or like whatever map it had access to was not up to date and things had shifted and necessarily the threat wasn't necessarily in the place that they thought it was because it might have been observing an old map and however whatever algorithm it's it's is going into it so there's certainly things like that that would you kind of maybe want a human a human check on that uh but i i don't know and again this is this is just what the news is saying we're not getting

35:06into any of that but that's just something so i i think basically i'm saying i think you're right yeah i i think that's that just belies the point that you were making which is about human judgment right is that this is why human judgment is so important in in these scenarios uh we we brought this up earlier too about the critical thinking and i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna ask the listeners to go along with me here because i'm gonna use a real life scenario because current ai ai models obviously

35:37aren't perfect and in fact i recently so this my project for the summer or spring and summer is i recently added the dimensions of a koi pond that i was wanting to install in my backyard and i i put it into chat gpt so i i have this koi pond that i have identified so it's like a liner um that's already you know got its its shape and dimensions and everything so i gave chat gpt the exact depth width length and even the fact that this particular pond would be 165 gallons so all i was asking for

36:13was what kind of fish would work in that environment uh how many fish should i get and what equipment would i need for a sustainable environment so those fish you know live in you know a nice life and the first thing it said was something along the lines of quote a 650 gallon pond like the one you plan to install is too small for koi when i specifically told them it told chat gpt it was 165 gallons like i have that dimension and gave it to them so with such simple mistakes like that what role does human critical thinking play in an ai driven world yeah that's the really interesting thing

36:49about these ai models right is that and again this is why my colleague says all the time there's no intelligence there right because you know any human with any kind of intelligence would have seen this and not made this mistake right they just said well 165 isn't the same as 650 but that's not how these ai tools work these ai tools try to guess what words come next based on the content based on what you've given they in the case the ai agents they try to guess

37:21what are the things to go do next right what are the the things to click on what are the the phrases to send what are the images to create based on the words that i've seen and sometimes they get those wrong it's just a guess it's a predictive text kind of guess about what to do next and sometimes it can be you know wrong and sort of embarrassingly silly kind of way is like in your example blake and so that to your point i mean yeah i mean there's all the ones about strawberries i've seen these great

37:53videos where people give uh these ai tools trolley problems but then they complicate the trolley problems or they give different variants of these trolley problems that cause the ai to do things that kind of don't make any sense you kind of go wait why would you make this call but not this call and this is what i mean when i talk about the importance of human judgment this is what i mean when i talk about the importance of ethical decision making because clearly our ai tools are not well

38:24designed for for doing these kind of things and for some reason they too tend to struggle with specific numbers like this like they're not numerical calculators so sometimes they get these kind of numerical things wrong you know the other day blake i asked one of our internal ai tools because i didn't know the answer somebody had reached out to me and they said hey what's the correlation between two of these subscales on the hds and i don't know right i need to go refer to our technical materials and so i would have to go find that technical material but i thought you know what

38:55i'm going to ask our internal little ai tool we call hogan brain what that correlation is to see if it knows what i was really hoping it would do was go find the document that actually contained the correlation so i could find it very easy so that i knew what document it was and it gave me an answer and it said the answer is 0.50 and it gave me a link to a document well i went and looked at the document and no that's that's not in the document it would be impossible to tell from that document what the correlation was but it read this document it clearly thought this document was relevant and it

39:29was kind of a relevant document for the question but it didn't actually have the number it needed in the document to answer the question but it still gave an answer anyway so i went to our global norms and calculated the answer because that was easier than trying to find it and the answer was 0.68 so it's higher than what chadgbt said and it and certainly that difference is a real difference right i mean it shouldn't have made this mistake well it wasn't chadgbt i guess it was our hogan brain

39:59but the point is that sometimes with kinds of numbers it really struggles and again this is where i think human judgment is really important um you know i have a 13 year old who's who does math problem you know for homework and schoolwork and things like that sometimes we'll bring the math problems and one of the things that you probably remember from your own math education is sometimes you get an answer that's just doesn't make any sense right it's implausible like that

40:29like that there's no way that could be the right answer doesn't make any sense in the context and that was intentional right that you would get problems where the idea was could you figure out that this doesn't make any sense that there's no way this could be the answer but that's a critical thinking skill that's a judgment skill that's can you you know intuitively estimate right you might remember those you had to do estimation problems right where you could have figured out the right answer but the the teacher wanted you to estimate well part of that is so that

41:04you can understand when the answer is egregiously off that this can't be right there must be an error there and i think again that's where human judgment is so valuable because we can go wait a minute this this this is not even close whereas you know in the like in the case of your koi pond example the ai is way off yeah and it also comes down to to people i mean really you can't put all your trust in these things not yet anyway yeah and and then that's people because because it really got me thinking i was

41:38like wow maybe the product description was wrong from the manufacturer you know because you know the ai but then i was like i was like no i was like because i started like thinking i was like there's that's a big difference in the amount of gallons and i'm like i've seen this thing in person i'm like there's no way that that's so i'm kind of curious blake is this too small for koi was it even correct about that uh that it actually is uh it is so i think i think i'm calling it a

42:08koi pond where i i've actually found a a couple two different breeds for specifically for uh it's also oklahoma that are goldfish that can are hardy and can can survive in in you know hot and cold as long as you keep like a hole in the ice if it gets frozen gotcha yeah all that well underway yeah my wife thinks she's like this is the last project on your list okay uh but uh moving on you know one might have assumed 10 15 20 years ago that creativity which we mentioned earlier would

42:43likely remain a key differentiator for humans over ai however ai is demonstrating some pretty incredible abilities to produce art music and even movie characters created out of thin air so in a battle between humans and ai when it comes to creativity who wins this yeah it's really interesting so the thing that i've been saying about creativity is that i do think to some extent an ai can be creative it sort of depends on your definition of what counts as creativity

43:16but i don't think they're particularly innovative right so what happens is they draw from lots of pieces of information that are exist and make connections and put ideas together that can be seen as creative ideas but to me that doesn't make them particularly innovative uh and so again maybe there's a you know a difference in and how we define these these terms but to me an innovation is is to really come up with something that nobody else has ever thought of before i think that's been the

43:47hope around ai that ai would uh that you would you know use uh all this medical knowledge for example and ai could take all that synthesize all the information and boom we would have a cure for many diseases because the ai was able to synthesize so much information that humans couldn't but that doesn't seem to be happening right so i'm not sure that an ai is going to help us solve those kinds of problems i think that that's where human innovation is still going to be really important

44:17so i i think in terms of yeah if you want to write a screenplay or something like that you can use an ai to do it it will feel familiar to some extent it'll feel like other screenplays that you've read it might even be really good but it won't really be innovative right it might even again it might feel creative because it might be combining ideas from different screenplays that other people hadn't thought about but i don't think it's going to be particularly innovative and like i did want

44:51to make one other comment about um this funny thing about ai making mistakes uh some people these these sort of solopreneurs have been creating companies right so i've created a company and i'm running this company all on my own and i've got ai agents who are doing all these things like i talked about earlier they're doing my marketing they're doing my customer support uh they're doing sales generation right they're you know the ai agents are doing all of this kind of work they're also doing the programming right they're programming doing the software programming for them for the company as

45:22well here's a really funny thing that i've seen people who have an ai agent that is designed to write the code then an ai agent that is designed to test the code by running test cases through and then an ai agent that is assigned to squishing bugs to finding bugs in the code and fixing them now i think that's really funny because if you you would think if you were hiring an ai agent to write the code it wouldn't have bugs right it still does even if an ai agent writes it which i think says

45:57something really interesting about how challenging it is to write bug-free code to begin with but um it also says that to some extent what these ai agents are doing it's just the same thing that humans are doing they're just able to do it you know with computer-like speed interesting yeah and i'm wondering what kind of music it would produce if jimmy hendrix had never existed you know like right that that's a game changer that i just you you talk about ai maybe not really being that innovative

46:27there's if he had never existed the music as a whole the industry would completely sound completely different you know therefore ai what it produces would sound completely different so that that's just one example that comes to mind but let's let's okay now let's start bringing this in for a landing and bring it back to what we do at hogan which boils down to assessing talent for selection and development purposes so how might organizations need to rethink these critical workplace decisions you know ai is inevitably going to play a role but when it comes to final decisions are those decisions

47:03ultimately going to be made by ai or humans well a couple of things to say there blake so first i do think this is going to impact how organizations think about their talent their talent needs i think there's no doubt about that when it comes to evaluating that talent personality assessments still offer one of the best ways to evaluate that talent particularly if we're looking at a new set of skills if we're looking at these skills like critical thinking if we're looking at these skills around decision making decision making style preferences uh those sort of automatic biases that we might have to go with this this direction or that direction to make those kinds of decisions

47:37that we make all the time i think that's where personality assessments can give you those kind of insights into what kinds of things your organization is going to look like based on the decisions that people are making because those decisions are going to have an out-sized impact suddenly because they're not going to be doing the work they're going to be making decisions about what work gets done what work gets prioritized what's most important so to start my answer your question i think that the humans are still going to be making a lot of these decisions but there's a really interesting case that comes up

48:09here blake and that concerns the personality of the ai agents do ai agents need to have a personality do we want them to have a personality and what kind of personality will we want them to have do we want them to have different personalities for different roles or different jobs or do we want it to be the same do we want that to differ based on company and company culture and i think these questions are totally unanswered right you could imagine creating an ai agent that has the perfect customer service

48:42personality right whatever that might be uh you could imagine that that would be different in a different company you could also imagine that you say no we don't want our ai agents to have any personality at all we want them to be i don't know just ai agents to some extent and these are big questions that that i don't think we have the the answer to um but i do think this is an important place for hogan to play a role as well as helping organizations understand if you're working with an

49:12ai agent if you're building ai agents how do you want them to behave how do you want them to communicate with the people that they're working with and connecting to and maybe there's certain personality characteristics that you want to use to inform how those ai agents operate interesting well this has been a great conversation but i got one last question it's kind of similar to what we ask our our our guests uh and for my last question here what do you think the world of work is going to look

49:44like in 2050 yeah so i think at this point you know i you know predictions about the future tend to be you know grossly wrong but uh i have to say i think the world of work is going to change pretty dramatically in the next quarter century um you know maybe even sooner than that i i somebody asked me the other day how long do you think it'll be until there's a commercial airline a commercial flight that's entirely powered by ai it's probably too soon i'm probably being too optimistic or whatever you want

50:18to be about this but 2030 seemed within the realm of possibility to me i i wouldn't i wouldn't strongly argue against you on that yeah or i thought you're gonna say you wouldn't get on that flight which i think is the interesting question right i'd wait i'd let other people do it first for sure yeah i think certainly that's the big thing right is the thing is though that a lot of times when there are accidents in these kinds of scenarios or even car accidents or things a lot of times is human air that is causing those accidents and so i mean to the extent to which people find it more

50:52productive safer um to to operate these things with it now there's all kinds of other risks that come associated with that we haven't talked at all really today about security i mean if you've got an ai agent flying every plane over your country and monitoring doing all the air traffic control what happens when the system that's controlling that gets hacked by bad actors right i mean what happens when they

51:24you know i and i don't know right i don't know what kind of security systems you put in to safeguard these kinds of things um so i think those are actually going to be some of the biggest questions we've seen a huge rise in spam or um any kind of phishing kind of attempts and emails over the recent months because ai agents can now do this they're much more sophisticated attacks than we've ever seen before and so i think that's gonna be the big race is can the technology can security

52:00support the technology potential uh and i don't know the answers to that but i think to the extent to which security can can protect us from the from from sort of bad actors so that that potential could come through for this we're going to see a pretty dramatically different world of work in 2050 so one the the thought that i keep coming back to and i i gave this a lot of i mean i've given this a lot of thought recently because we you know on the marketing team we kind of had a little discussion

52:32about it uh in our slack feed and one of the it just it i keep coming back to the fact okay you have all of these organizations that are looking at ai as a way to cut costs by cutting costs i mean uh having less uh humans working there because they can you know invest in an ai model that will you won't have to keep paying once you pay it off and then you can and it can do all these jobs for you but and that

53:07in the short term would help a company's bottom line but in an economy especially in a capitalist society like we have now at some point if there's so many people that are unemployed and without some sort of universal basic income these people aren't going to have money to buy the things that or products or services that these companies are selling therefore long term it doesn't seem like a stable business model

53:39to have a bunch of people out of the workforce with no money who can't buy the things that these organizations are selling what are your thoughts on that yeah well i mean those are these are that's what i mean when i say maybe we'll all be employed as philosophers someday because i think these are really important philosophical questions i think you know to your point there there is a the the economy is fueled by people participating in the economy right it's a self-perpetuating system to the extent to which people no longer perpetuate that system then there aren't you know uh there

54:15are jobs because people have needs and demands if all the people's needs and demands are met then why are there jobs right uh these kinds of i think these kind of questions are going to continue to be answered uh over the next uh i think quarter century is about right um so yeah you know that that's that's where where i see this headed is that you know and you talk about universal basic income blake and i can tell you one of the there's a really tricky sort of concern with that um well you know

54:46you're essentially putting somebody else in control of you know i don't know when and how much you get fed yeah and that's a weird world to think about um you know i think to some extent people want to have agency and autonomy over you know when and how much they get fed when somebody else suddenly has control of that over you um i'm not sure how well that's going to work i don't think we've seen good examples of that working well in in the past so um it is certainly a wild time uh to be looking

55:22to be looking at the world and be working the world today well i can tell you one thing we will be back in two weeks to talk about something else that's what we're going to do or ai agents of us one yeah we'll see we might be sipping cocktails on the beach instead we will everybody will think we're here uh but uh well i ryan awesome conversation i always like interviewing you i mean on these episodes where we don't have a guest uh because i think there's a lot of people out there who want to hear your point of view on this and i think your point of view is one that that i think people

55:55need to take seriously and and uh because you and your team are are are asking the right questions and thinking about the the right things and where this is heading so i appreciate you taking the time to have this chat and look forward to the next one all right well thanks blake and that does it for the science of personality podcast episode 145 be sure to join us in two weeks for another fun and informative episode cheers everybody this has been the science of personality podcast brought to

56:29you by hogan assessments you can access all episodes on our website the science of personality.com or on the streaming service of your choice see you next time the science of personality podcast episode 145 be sure to join us in two weeks for a long time and we'll see you next time you