LOOKING TO FUTURE-PROOF YOUR CAREER IN THE AGE OF AI? A SHOWDOWN BETWEEN KIDS AND MACHINES POINTS THE WAY

With a steady drumbeat of studies and surveys suggesting AI may soon replace a great many human workers, it's easy to feel panicked about how artificial intelligence might impact your business. And it's not just entrepreneurs -- many professionals are worried about how AI might impact their careers at the moment. But before you lose too much sleep over whether a robot might come for your livelihood, I point you to a fun, fascinating, and reassuring recent study out of the University of California, Berkeley. The one skill where the kids crushed the machines The research, recently published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, wasn't done by a computer science lab or an engineering department. Instead, it was carried out in the lab of psychologist Alison Gopnik, who is well known for her research and books on child development. Why was this lab getting involved in AI? Like a far more scientific version of the game show Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader, the team pitted kids aged 3 to 7 against several AI models, including GPT-4, to figure out who was the better performer. The contest consisted of two rounds. In the first, focused on recall and application of existing knowledge, both the bots and the kids were asked to select from a group of objects the one that best matched a particular tool. There were no big surprises here. All the pairings were conventional: A nail goes with a hammer, for example. The second test was focused on innovation rather than recall. For this task, the kids and bots were presented with a group of everyday objects and were asked which one they could use to complete a task. None of the objects was directly associated with the task (if they were trying to bang a nail, no hammer was available). But one object was similar enough to existing tools in some essential way that it could get the job done. For example, if subjects were asked to draw a circle, they could trace the bottom of a round teapot. Who performed better? With vast training libraries and huge computing power behind them, the AI models outperformed the grade schoolers when it came to retrieving correct information about well-known scenarios. But when it came to thinking creatively, the kids crushed the machines. In the teapot example above, for instance, a recent version of ChatGPT only figured out to use the teapot 8 percent of the time. Four-year-olds got it right 85 percent of the time. How to future-proof your career The long-term aim of this research is to figure out how parents teach their kids to think creatively so that maybe, one day, scientists can teach AI to think this way too. But in the meantime, this story is useful for entrepreneurs -- and others -- in more immediate ways. While tools like image generation engines and chatbots perform amazingly well at tasks that involve retrieving and reorganizing existing information, they remain pretty useless when it comes to actually innovative ideas. The researchers suggest we may want to update our mental models of this technology accordingly. "A lot of people like to think that large language models are these intelligent agents like people," the study's first author, Eunice Yiu, told Psyche. "But we think this is not the right framing." Instead, the authors suggest we think of these tools more like a very fancy card catalog or Google search box. They're exceptional information-retrieval machines. Humans remain uniquely good at understanding the deeper properties of the world around them and using that information to come up with new ideas or unique combinations. Previously, a report from the University of Oxford and comments from Harvard experts both suggested it's this childlike ability to engage with the physical world and dream up new connections (as well as empathy and EQ) that will set humans apart for a long time yet. This new study just underlines this advice. If you're looking to future-proof your business and career, those are the skills you should probably lean into.