Neuroscientist Vivienne Ming recently wrote a column in The Wall Street Journal drawing from her experiences of working with AI for the past 30 years. Her research suggests that we might be worrying about the wrong things when it comes to AI. She shares, “We’ve been sold a story about AI that goes something like this: It will handle the tedious, routine work—the research, the first draft, the number-crunching—while we focus on the interesting parts: creativity, judgment, and the human touch.”
Ming’s studies find that the opposite is true. For humans to maximize return from AI engagement, they must be able to work collaboratively with the AI platform. That means you’ll need to have done the boring work, put in the rigor, and developed a good understanding of what you’re exploring, so you have a base of knowledge to challenge AI. That’s how better happens.
Asking AI for the answer dulls human capability. Pushing AI to defend its answers and find out what you’re missing makes it a powerful collaborator. Ming encourages us to “Treat AI like a brilliant colleague who has read everything and understands nothing—useful precisely because they’re different from you, not because they’ll agree with you.”
To do this, she believes humans need to develop two key qualities:
- Perspective-taking. The ability to genuinely inhabit another point of view. Not to debate it or tolerate it, but to actually inhabit it. This requires genuine curiosity and openness to minds other than yours. When you know an issue well enough to take on points that run counter to your beliefs and impressions, you can get so much more from AI support.
- Intellectual humility. The ability to recognize the edge of your own knowledge and sit with the discomfort rather than trying to rush to fill it. This takes the courage to feel uncertain, even foolish, in the presence of something that seems very sure of itself. You can’t know everything. When you know what you don’t know, you can better focus AI on discovery—whether you’re doing research, reviewing data, or seeking new strategic perspectives.
The more we review confident, engaging AI responses and continue to question what’s missing or what could be better, the more we’ll leverage the technology for greater results. By bringing skepticism to the quick, easy, “right” answers AI provides, we’ll keep building our intellectual rigor. The real worry Ming warns about is when we start to optimize ourselves out of the loop, taking machine responses as unexamined truth. Or when we gradually outsource our judgments to artificial analysis. Instead, we must lead AI, wrestle with ideas, put in the effort, and let the tool help us push our thinking rather than subordinate it.
Founded in 2004, Lead Star is the company behind the best-selling books SPARK, Leading from the Front, and Bet on You. Lead Star helps professionals reach new levels of success through its innovative leadership development programs.
