The true value of human-to-human connection

One lesson we learned during the pandemic is the value of in-person connections. I was at TechCrunch at the time and like many publications, we tried to keep the conference engine revving with a series of virtual gatherings. Of course, it worked from a content standpoint, but the true benefit of events is not the content (although that obviously is a big part of it), it's the conversations, the connections and the uniquely human moments that can only happen when we are together.

I could write FastForward from the comfort of my home office without ever leaving, but there is so much value in talking to other people. My trips to HumanX this month and CRM Playaz IRL in March have enriched my thinking and my reporting and writing. I probably wouldn't have written my commentary on headless everything if I hadn't had a real-life chat about it first.

At that same event, Esteban Kolsky made an assertion in a presentation that his skills as an analyst could easily be replaced by a model. The idea surprised me so much that I felt I had to say something. Essentially I said that while models can look back at what they've been fed and write reports, they can't do what we were doing in that room -- gather and talk to one another about what we were seeing. When it comes to being an analyst, Kolsky deals with real companies and customers, which are a valuable part of what he does, and it's not anything a bot is capable of doing.

In a podcast after that presentation, my friend Jon Reed, cofounder at diginomica and a fellow IRL attendee, questioned Kolsky about my pushback. He basically agreed but for different reasons. "What we [knowledge workers] provide is that intuition, that innovation, that imagination, that computers don't have.”

In his Rose Colored Glasses podcast this week, long-time content marketing guru (and I say that in the truest sense of the word) Robert Rose made a similar point. "Nobody (should) hire a marketer because they can operate software," he said. "They hire a marketer because they can think — because they have the taste, judgment and audience/market understanding to know which tasks are even worth doing in the first place."

The human touch

The true value of any knowledge worker is not simply information gathering, it's having the judgment to take that information and turn it into something else. Yes, models can do that too, but what they can't do is learn new things on their own.

And this applies to journalists too, albeit in a different way. We too have taste and judgment. We understand what makes a good story and we shouldn't be ceding our valuable intuition and knowledge of whatever beat we cover to a model that is only capable of feeding back what it knows, and is incapable of collecting fresh details.

Consider that if the Watergate scandal happened today, Woodward and Bernstein would still have to perform good, old-fashioned shoe leather journalism to root out the truth and get people to talk to them, even if it meant meeting in a creepy parking garage. That hasn't changed. Having models may have helped them synthesize their notes faster, but AI couldn't tell the story they told because they were out on the streets talking to sources, not regurgitating existing information into a new form.

There may in fact be value in that regurgitation, but let's not kid ourselves that it's the whole game because it's not. While tech bros and mad hatters may try to convince us otherwise, we have imagination and intuition and taste, something a model triggering zeros and ones and looking for the next token simply isn't capable of doing. And I think we can all take heart in that.

~Ron