ISLAMABAD: As AI rapidly advances, do human knowledge workers retain any lasting advantage? This is a million-dollar question in an era of intelligent machines.
In an interview with Forbes, Gian Segato of the AI company Replit offered a provocative answer. “It’s no longer as important to know how to do something,” he said. “It’s knowing that it needs to be done and then just doing it.”
According to Segato, AI already excels at “knowing how,” but the real value in today’s uncertain world lies in deciding what needs to be done and ensuring it happens. Who does that better—humans or AI?
“Cardinal virtues”
One promising framework comes from the ancient Greeks and Romans, who identified four “cardinal virtues” as habits of human excellence.
Speaking in an interview with Forbes, Dr Jay Richards has argued that these virtues—practical wisdom, justice, courage, and self-discipline—represent peak human performance across thought, action, and feeling, and could provide a uniquely human advantage.
AI can already gather and process vast amounts of information, set goals from programmed value functions, and even project empathy. In tests of moral reasoning, people often prefer AI-generated conclusions to human ones.
Yet, as Richards notes, human beings retain a decisive edge in practical wisdom and justice because our goal-setting and sense of fairness arise from within.
We possess free will and an innate sense of fairness, evident even in toddlers, while AI relies on values programmed by others and lacks self-reflection.
The remaining virtues—courage and self-discipline—deal with fear and desire.
Foster virtues
While AI’s lack of emotion can be useful in dangerous tasks, human emotions fuel motivation, creativity and moral progress. Still, the question remains: do all humans truly live from their “best selves”? “Whether humans can be durably superior to AI depends on which humans we mean—those living from their best selves or those mired in their worst,” the text observes.
Experts suggest that education and workplaces should deliberately foster these virtues.
While AI models are upgraded at breakneck speed, perhaps the next real upgrade should be our own – cultivating wisdom, justice, courage and self-discipline to remain distinctly, and durably, human.
