Something revolutionary is happening.

Like most revolutionary things, it’s thrilling – scary and exciting at the same time… It’s ChatGPT.

The media is abuzz with stories about the mind blowing things ChatGPT can do. Its artificial intelligence enables it to do a decent job writing essays, news stories, emails, jokes and poetry. It has the potential to answer any question in a way that makes sense to a human.

The AI in ChatGPT advanced through machine learning, where bots comb through data to learn how to perform tasks. That meant reading a lot. And with some guidance from its creators, it learned how to write coherently. What it can do is really quite stunning.

…It has people wondering what they will do once the machines take over work…

The risks and ethics are certainly scary to think about. One reporter painted a doomsday scenario where people are identified by AI as a barrier to a goal and need to be removed in order to complete a task.

Doomsday scenarios aside, I like the idea of relying more on AI for transactional work, freeing us to do the relational work we are uniquely qualified for. Our growth trajectory would be more defined by emotional intelligence and the outcomes associated with it.

At work, emotional intelligence is associated with the advantages that come from human connection. Human connection creates unbelievable advantages in creativity, innovation, well-being and resilience. Higher levels of emotional intelligence have been associated with better outcomes in the classroom, the boardroom, the state room and the family room.

Many of these benefits are supported by the physiological state of feeling connected to one another. It takes us out of a reactive state and puts us into a more relaxed, rational state where we can be more creative, courageous and strategic.

In her ,TedTalk Kelly McGonagle describes how human connection is a built in mechanism for our bodies to counter the harmful effects of stress. She presents research showing that when under stress our clever bodies secrete two hormones. One is cortisol, which primes us for fight or flight, making our blood vessels constrict. Chronic exposure can cause heart disease and other poor health outcomes.

The other hormone secreted by our bodies during stress is oxytocin, also known as the “cuddle hormone.” It’s a natural inflammatory that primes us for connection and helps the body, including blood vessels, relax.

In moments of stress, if we turn toward each other we get more oxytocin enabling us to think more rationally and temper the harmful physiological response to cortisol. So, our stress response has a built-in mechanism for stress resilience, and that response is human connection.

We spend so much of our days in transactional work so relational work falls by the wayside and we suffer in myriad ways. Think about the percent of time you spend planning, presenting and executing instead of persuading, listening and understanding.

Wouldn’t it be fascinating if AI was our way back to each other?

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