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There are lots of discussions and debates nowadays regarding the evolution of work with growing AI impact.

Noticed a very interesting article, “Is AI Smarter Than People? It’s complicated”, in the Wall Street Journal (source below). It also highlights inputs from a related experiment, and the human qualities most likely to matter in the evolving world of work.

These are selected notes from the article.
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* My research suggests that we’ve been asking the wrong question and drawing the wrong conclusions.
* In an experiment relating to prediction market accuracy, the hybrid teams (human-AI) reached insightful conclusions that neither a human nor a machine could have produced on its own.

* It’s not that these people were more intelligent than others in the study. They demonstrated two important qualities: perspective-taking and intellectual humility.
–Perspective taking – ability to genuinely inhabit another point of view.
–Intellectual humility – ability to recognize the edge of your own knowledge and sit with that discomfort rather than trying to rush to fill it.
* Perspective-taking requires requires genuine curiosity about minds other than your own. Intellectual humility requires a kind of emotional courage: the willingness to feel uncertain, even a little foolish, in the presence of something or someone that seems very sure of itself.

* These are not the soft skills we typically celebrate.
* What my experiment suggests is that the human qualities mostly likely to matter are the uncomfortable ones: the capacity to be wrong in public and stay curious; to sit with a question…to read a confident, fluent response from an AI and ask yourself, “What’s missing?”…to disagree with something that sounds authoritative and to trust your instinct enough to follow it.
* We don’t build these capacities by avoiding discomfort. We build them, by choosing it, repeatedly, in small ways.
* Most AI chatbots today default to easy answers which is hurting our ability to think critically.
*…the divergence I worry about – the quieter process of people gradually outsourcing the judgment…
* What can any of us actually do about it? Start with the reframe: The goal of working with AI isn’t to get the answer faster. It’s to find what you are missing…use AI as a savant collaborator to explore uncertainty.
* Perspective-taking, intellectual humility and curiosity are traits that can be cultivated.
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Source: Is AI Smarter Than People? It’s complicated; Vivienne Ming (neuroscientist, cognitive scientist and author of “Robot-Proof…”); April 25-26, 2026