Humans are masters of the question and the better question

AI is a Lot of Nothing Without Human Questions

This is the first part of a feature-length article published this month in the annual magazine Associations Evolve 2024 & Beyond by Answers for Associations, a free online community hub for association professionals. Again, this month, featured in Medium. Links to both publications are at the end of this post for you to get your own download of the whole article.

You are overthinking this and making yourself fearful or obsessive or a hot mess. News about artificial intelligence has been in your face and up your nose every freaking day of 2023.

Association leaders are supposed to be courageous, insightful, empathetic, and curious; so, let’s grab that emergency brake, pull hard, and do a 180 turn to put a lot more attention on what matters more than AI.

Human potential matters more and saying what makes us human matters the most.

I’ve been thinking about this article all year, knowing we would have our moment in January 2024 when Associations Evolve reaches more than 50,000 other association executives around the world.

I intended to craft an article that shakes your world and makes you feel like the smartest one in the room. This is all about asking questions and then coming right back with even better questions. This is about giving you the questions to change the conversation and get out of the way of the train wreck you see coming right to you and the profession and industry you represent.

The Art of the Painfully Obvious

Let’s start with questions that point to our humanity and potential to evolve as humans to value relationships more than ephemeral things and value collaboration more than the competition—more “we” than “me”.

Millions of studies, books, articles, and bits of wisdom— just in the short span of your lifetime, tell us we are stepping into a moment in human history, unlike the past 1000 years or even the past 300,000 years when we stood upright and lived as hunter-gatherers. That’s right. This time it’s different.

That’s the jaw-dropping part of what’s happening now. We feel overwhelmed and a bit in awe that we are living on the unfolding edge of our development as a human species. And it’s happening faster than humans are used to moving.

What happens next? What are the alternative conversations we need to have and what are the questions?

If your intention and gut tell you to assign a team to look at AI and what it means for your association, your profession, and your job future, then, a smarter and long-game move would be to also assign another team to look at the potential of humans. Put the same number of super-smart people and the same money into both of those task forces.

What Are the Questions and Better Questions?

AI is a whole lot of nothing without human questions. Humans are at their best when asking questions and they have brains so complex that science is still trying to learn more about how humans are exceptionally brilliant at coming up with better questions on top of better questions. It starts when we are very young, learning the environment close to us, and we have mastered three words—Mama, Dadda, and Why?

Here are some starter questions.

If a tree falls in a forest and no humans witness it, does the tree make a sound? Now, see if you can turn that into a little harder and better question: If there are no humans that love, wonder, create, and seek community with other humans, then who will feed questions to the artificial intelligence tool?

Image by Steve Bidmead from Pixabay

For the questions and better questions in the rest of this article, you can get your free download of the whole magazine at Associations Evolve 2024 & Beyond. Another option is to read the full article at this Medium link.

This article was my farewell piece to a community of industry leaders I served for 42 years before making the transition to the co-founder of the Gifted Professionals and Communicators community. I found something bigger and more meaningful to work on. You don’t have to be gifted or neurodiverse to love it, but you do need to be professional and love to communicate.

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