Self-Awareness, The Key to AI
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The Last Show with David Cooper. Procrastinate your life away with us. I'm sure you've heard the buzz about AI making workers smarter, faster, more productive. But a new study suggests the real secret might be something a little more human. Workers who know what they're good at, who know what their strengths are. And when it's time to let AI take the wheel, those are the ones that benefit the most from these new tools. I'm here with someone who worked on that study. He is an economics professor at NYU. His name is Andrew Kaplan. Andrew, welcome to the program.
What does the latest study reveal about AI and self-awareness?
Thank you very much. I think there's a lot of doom and gloom, a lot of fear mongering about AI taking people's jobs and other people being forced to be overly productive. What I like about your study is it frames things like who are these tools good for? What is it about self-awareness at the helm of me using AI that'll make me a better worker with it? Well, you know, what we were looking for is to find out what skills, this is a wide open question, what skills help people work with an AI? And we found that a way underrated skill is your ability to listen to what the AI tells you. So for example, when you're looking at a medical image, if the AI says it's 95% likely to have a particular condition,
You better be able to say, well, I knew anyway. The doctors will often say, I knew, I'll overrule 100%. That's rubbish.
How can understanding strengths improve AI utilization at work?
You know, I know the answer. And typically they're wrong. Often they're miscalibrated. They're way overconfident in their beliefs and they can't listen. I do think knowing your own limits and being self-aware is probably a good skill to have independent of AI, isn't it? I don't know. It doesn't pay in many branches that I've been observing. You know, I'm not sure it's been working in politics. I don't think it works in medicine. You have to appear very confident. And it doesn't work actually in the false art of predicting the future under AI, in which everybody gets to be Nostradamus and tells you what's going to happen. Let's start with this basic idea of calibration. When someone says they're well calibrated, what does that mean?
Why does that make me excellent using AI if I am well calibrated? Well, it means that when you think something is 70% likely, it's roughly objectively 70% likely. When you're very confident that something is true, 95 to 100%, it had better be true 95 to 100% of the time. Those are the kinds of things that can be checked and the evidence shows that many, many people and in many circumstances are 95% sure and 60% right. And that's not a very comfortable thing. But imagine then you get an AI that tells you something and it's only rationally like 85% confident. And you say, it's just a fool. I see so much better. I won't listen to it. there's a surprising finding in your study that I love because I'm not a very bright individual.
It's that lower skill workers who have a good measure of their own ability benefit the most from AI. Yes, absolutely. And in the particular thing we studied, it was like the AI is helpful and it's a little bit better, you know, than you if this isn't your great speciality, but you better recognize that and then you can become pretty good yourself. So that's the, that's the root. So, it's a logical following that the AI is making the less able, the less skilled among us better, as long as they have a good sense of self-awareness? Self-awareness is critical, but no, I would give a big fat caveat to that. Okay. The caveat is, and the thing that I'm currently most interested in, is whether in fact It's about being good at asking questions and listening to answers.
So my own take is that the biggest, generalizing out of that study, the biggest skills are, can you listen? But not only can you listen, in the words with large language models, do you know how to ask questions?
What skills enhance collaboration with AI according to the study?
Do you understand the limits and the skills of the party you're talking with? Because with a large language model, that's your job. I mean, I use large language model a lot and I am constantly editing it, but I'm nevertheless listening.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–0:37
2
What does the latest study reveal about AI and self-awareness?
0:37–1:35
3
How can understanding strengths improve AI utilization at work?
1:35–4:32
4
What skills enhance collaboration with AI according to the study?
4:32–8:00
5
Why is self-awareness important for effective AI usage?
8:00–9:42
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