Can AI Replace You? Larry Wilson Explains Why It Can't

Will artificial intelligence replace your job?

In this thought-provoking episode of How to Talk to Humans, communication expert Larry Wilson explores one of today's biggest questions: Is AI coming for your career?

From ChatGPT and automation to customer service and the future of work, Larry examines how artificial intelligence is changing the workplace—and why one uniquely human ability will always remain in demand.

Using examples from Dune, live performance, business, and everyday communication, Larry explains why empathy, storytelling, and authentic human connection are skills no machine can truly duplicate.

In this episode:

•  Will AI replace human jobs? 
•  The truth about ChatGPT and automation 
•  What careers are most at risk 
•  Why communication skills are future-proof 
•  The power of empathy and authentic human connection 
•  How storytelling builds trust in business and life 
•  Why live performers and great communicators will always matter 

If you're wondering how to thrive in the age of artificial intelligence, this episode will give you practical insights—and a renewed appreciation for the value of being human. 

AI, Artificial Intelligence, ChatGPT, future of work, communication skills, Larry Wilson, Wilson Method, human connection, empathy, storytelling, leadership, business communication, customer service, automation, career advice, public speaking, persuasion, productivity, Dune, Frank Herbert

Hosted by Larry Wilson
Produced by: Verbal Ninja Productions
Producer: R. Scott Edwards
Sponsored by: The Wilson Method

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Transcript

Larry Wilson 0:02

Hi, this is Larry Wilson and this is How to Talk to Humans. This is the podcast that shows you how to improve your communication skills. Are you looking to get a better job? Are you looking to find a relationship? Are you trying to do things in your life that have frustrated you and eluded you so far? I can show you so easily how to change that. Now, I can only do it with humans. If you're looking to deal with vampires or zombies extraterrestrial, this is not the show for you. But if you're really looking to improve your communication skills, I can show you what I've learned from 40 years in the show business working with the biggest celebrities and superstars in the world, and their secrets are unbelievable. What I'm going to be teaching you during the course of this podcast every week are tools that you can use to communicate toward success. Hi, this is Larry Wilson. Thanks again for joining me for another episode of How to Talk to Humans. And this may be the very last episode before the robot overlords take us all to harvest our natural bodily fluids. Why they want to do that, I'm not exactly sure. But I've never pretended to understand the robots or what their goals are. I of course, for many of you listening who are suddenly filled with terror, I should point out I'm being facetious. This is not going to be the last episode. Of course, if it is, and the robot overlords are taking over, you'll have much bigger fish to fry than worrying about Larry Wilson's podcast. But in the event that we still manage to survive, I titled this episode, AI is Coming for Your Job, because so many people have asked me specifically what my take on this is. There are so many different kinds of AI that are taking place right now. I think the one that is in the news the most is Chat GPT. I have no idea what that stands for, GPT. I'm sure it's something horrible. But also for those of you who are thinking everyone else knows what it means, AI, of course, stands for artificial intelligence. And I think it's used by technological people to refer to non-human intelligence. So this would be computers and machines that have been built and programmed to think like a human brain. And the element that I think is most controversial right now, and perhaps the reason it's in the news and people are talking about it, is one of the goals of artificial intelligence is to replicate the human ability to learn and improve itself. We think of machines usually as having a set function. This is a can opener. Doesn't matter how many times you use it, it's not ever going to become a radio. Or this is a car. Doesn't matter how well you maintain it and how perfectly it's driven, doesn't matter what kind of fuel you put in it, it's never going to be an airplane. But artificial intelligence, the idea is that it's constantly learning. And when it perceives it's made a mistake or it misunderstands something, theoretically, it's supposed to learn from that and make itself smarter and better. And all of these things I'm discussing with you because I'm not a technoister by any means. All of them are supposed to be leading towards the uh what science people sometimes call the singularity when machines become self-aware. What do I have to say about that? Nothing. I don't have a clue about machines becoming self-aware. I guess they could, maybe they will, maybe I don't really know. Although I want to preface this entire episode by saying the one thing that has come to mind repeatedly in the last few weeks, reading about Chat GPT and artificial intelligence. There's a science fiction book that's a classic in modern science fiction from the early 60s called Dune, written by Frank Herbert. And I suppose if I were a more uh detail-oriented man, I would have looked that up and written down the publication date, but I want to say it must be 1960, 1961, something like that. Uh there's a film that just came out. Uh I think it's the first installment of Dune because Dune is a huge uh sprawling novel. It must be over 1,400 pages, I think. And Frank Herbert made an incredible investment in time and thought to really attempt to create not only another world and another time, but he went so far as to create another ecology. He created a planet that had nothing, uh very little water on it. It was mostly sand dunes. And uh it's a it's a fascinating book. It's a really interesting book. Um the movie installment I saw, I want to say from 2022, I loved. I thought uh they captured the feeling of this weird, ferocious desert planet and the natives, the indigenous people who somehow had learned to survive under these brutal, harsh conditions, uh, I thought they captured it perfectly. And I thought all the casting of the movie, uh, I'm looking forward to a second episode of it coming out soon. But what makes me think about Dune is, I wonder if you can imagine what it was like to have read this in the 1960s when Herbert had some crazy ideas in his book. One of them was he just tosses this off in passing, as if, oh, everyone knows this. At some point in the future, computers were outlawed because they developed their own consciousness, and humans decided it was too dangerous. And across the universe, they passed all these laws, and there was even, I think there was a religious thing in some new orange Catholic Bible of the future that said, thou shalt not make a machine that mimics the thought processes of a human or something like that. But because of it, all these humans had to learn to do things that computers used to do. And there were uh specific people who'd been trained in computations in their heads, and they drank a sort of a hypnotic, uh soporific chemical to help them do it. This is all invented by Frank Herbert, it's really quite imaginative, a really uh interesting thing to read. But I remember reading that and thinking, oh, that's hilarious. They'll never outlaw computers, you know. What computers are just great things that, you know, and of course we didn't really have computers in the 60s. Uh, or if they did, they were the size of a city block, so they could do simple mathematics like addition and subtraction. That's, you know, to four places. That's probably as far as they could go. But um it's interesting because I think that is what's coming to the surface now with artificial intelligence. I don't think I'm suggesting anything that people aren't talking about. Ums that came forward were people saying, oh, for schools, for colleges, high schools, elementary schools, where students could go online, ask Chat GPT for free to write a paper for them that they'd been assigned to do for school. And the most telling one is I uh read an account, I don't know if it's real or if it's fictitious, but about an eighth grader who had been given some assignment for something and went along and asked ChatGPT, and he looked at, you know, it it took ChatGPT, I think, one or two seconds to spew out this five-page paper. And the eighth grader looked at it and entered it again into ChatGPT and said, no, this is too good. Write this more so it sounds like an eighth grader wrote it. And then in another two seconds, ChatGPT spit out another version that was more like an eighth grader, and the kid turned it in and got an A on it. Now, they're always the question of unintended consequences. That's part of what makes life interesting. It's part of what makes predictions so difficult that somebody never is able to imagine all the funny twists and turns that can take place in life. But I think they started to see college students using chat GPT, and then also college professors were starting to use chat GPT to grade papers. And look so many people were using this artificial intelligence to do their work for them. I think this is the tip of the iceberg, of course. And of course, the news uh media has learned long ago that uh good news doesn't really attract much attention. It's sunny today, and everyone's getting free churros. Well, it's not really gonna get many hits, you know, online. What attracts people end of the world scheduled at 6 tonight. Stay tuned for the late news at 11. Well, really? I I thought it's ending at six. Well, maybe, but it might still be here at 11. It may be postponed. End of the world may not happen until after midnight. That's what gets people's attention. It always has. It's not something new. I think since time immemorial, I can picture cave people saying, Oh, you know, Uknerok from that tribe across the river, they have a much better kind of fire than we have. Our fire's going away. They're the only ones who'll have fire. I must say, as I'm saying Aknarok's voice, he sounds very educated and sophisticated. But I think, as with all technological advancements, certain jobs will become obsolete. No one can argue that with the advent of automobiles, certain accoutrements that um made sense for horse-drawn carriages and wagons and buggies simply became obsolete. The example I think people use is the buggy whip. That must have been a flexible whip to uh whip horses who are drawing a covered wagon. Well, those companies went out of business. There was no market for them. One can make the argument that any kind of change holds that threat. If uh, for example, uh if everyone were to decide that these meat substitutes uh beyond meat and impossible meat and other things like that, and can't believe it's meat, if they took over the marketplace, then maybe uh ranching and things like that would disappear. I don't know. I'm I can't make a prediction about that. But I can address the question of artificial intelligence taking great numbers of jobs away from people. If your job, for example, was involved in customer service, that seems to me to be an obvious choice that could be replaced. If artificial intelligence develops a chat GPT software that's so advanced that it's listening and able to identify what you're asking it, it could probably also be programmed to be more efficient and more specific, and it might have all kinds of choices. I don't know how fast these developments can take place, although people uh who are experts in this field seem to think it's taking place at an alarming speed right now. That the first version of ChatGPT came out in November of 2022, and here in the first uh quarter or second quarter of 2023, they're already on the fourth version of ChatGPT. So is it possible that your job could go away? Sure, depends on what it is. We sometimes think when robots are involved, what about someone who's like a garbage collector? How are they going to do that? Well, it's possible that some sort of self-driving garbage truck that has uh uh robotic arms that are designed to lift up trash cans and empty them in. It's possible, sure, it could happen. I think more likely are those jobs I referred to before, like uh customer service. Uh those sorts of service jobs may be at great jeopardy of being replaced. But I'm here to tell you the good news. I cautioned you before that good news does not sell. And I'm sure this will be no exception. That the majority of people like to hear alarmist, you know, uh I should be taking this more seriously since we're talking about the end of humanity as we know it. But perhaps you realize I don't think it's the end of humanity. I'm sure the robot overlords would like to harvest us for our natural juices, but uh I'm betting on team human at this point. That's my idea. And that really is the key to the good news. There are certain elements about being human that can never be programmed into machines. I'm sure there's someone out there who's an expert with computers and machines and artificial intelligence who flatly disagrees with me. But what they're really talking about is the machines aren't magical. They only know as much as you have programmed them for. Now, if artificial intelligence is able to start educating itself, then theoretically, at some tipping point, it can start learning more and teaching itself more, advancing more. But it doesn't matter how much you put into a computer, it will never be a human. There's certain elements about being human, there's certain elements of humor, of compassion, of empathy that I think are impossible to program. You could program a simulacrum of those things, but it's not the same as the machine feeling them the way we feel them. And I this may sound like I'm uh um it may sound like I'm whistling past the graveyard, but I'm convinced that what I talk about every week on this podcast is one of the sacrosanct areas that can never be taken over by AI. That communication skills, advanced communication skills that really are on a master level, are very different than entry-level fundamental communication skills. Being able to say, walk down this hallway until you reach the red line, then turn to the right, open the second door. Well, sure, a computer can be programmed to provide that information and perhaps can even teach itself at some point. But on the fundamental thesis, I think, of Wilson method, that's unspoken, really, but those who've trained with me tumble to it very quickly, is that it is the human element that separates good communicators from expert communicators. And sometimes there are people, uh maybe it's their personality, maybe it's just a quirk, who are resentful of that. They wish things could be um evaluated or measured by some immutable metric that uh doesn't have any variance depending on the humanity of the person delivering it. I don't believe that. I believe that connecting with people on the deepest level allows you to convey your message in a way that creates authentic bonds. I do not believe that for most people machines can share those authentic bonds with you. I'm uh you you always hear me issue a caveat because there's someone somewhere who will have some kind of relationship with their computer. And your computer can be programmed. They've done experiments where they've uh created a sort of a robotic uh computer therapist for people. And what the program really did is it would have the computer repeat whatever someone said, sometimes changing a little bit, a word or something. I feel so sad today. And then the computer would say, You feel sad today? And the person would go, yeah, yeah, I just I don't feel like I fit in. And the computer would say, You feel like you don't fit in? Right. Well, that's not a real person, and it's certainly not a real therapist. And is a computer able to be programmed or to teach itself to such a high degree that it's able to make these extraordinary connections of the human experience to build on the idea of empathy with another. Does a machine feel like they don't fit in? I can't imagine it. If I was a machine, I'd think I fit in everywhere. I guess it just depends on the size of my uh casing or whatever it is I'm built inside of. Or if I'm on the cloud, then I fit in everywhere. But those human interactions, I think, can never be supplanted by artificial intelligence. I would urge those of you listening, if you're seriously concerned about this, I would look at what you do. I'd look at what you do in your life, I would particularly look at what you do to earn a living. And I would perhaps uh make the decision at this early stage of the game to begin focusing on things that had to do with more authentic connections with human beings. I I don't really know if this is true or not, but I think I think of the experience that I've had when I've performed places where there are children in the audience, sometimes very young children. And parents will come up to me after the performance and they'll say, This is incredible, this is amazing. I've never seen my kid put their phone down for the length of time, your entire show. They never looked at their phone. And my response is always the same. I'll say, Well, have they ever seen live theater before? And their parents go, oh, yeah, yeah, you know, they see it on the computer or on the I say, no, no, that's not the same experience. That's just a representation of what they just saw. When you see a live performance, and it doesn't have to be entertainment, it might be a lecture, it might be a teaching instruction, it might be a symphony, it might be someone reading from their own works, it might be dance or a symphony, it could be almost anything, but when you see live performers who love what they do, you can feel human energy coming off the stage. And it is galvanic. It is not like watching it on a phone, on a laptop, on a tablet. It is I I'm reminded of the Mark Twain quote. It's as close as the word lightning is to lightning bug. They seem similar, but they are worlds apart. And I do not believe the robot overlords. They may take away whatever the current buggy whip is, they may render that obsolete. I don't know what that might be. But I would not bet on it being a live performer. I wouldn't bet on stand-up comedians being replaced by the most advanced artificial intelligence. I wouldn't bet on that. I certainly wouldn't bet on magicians or dancers or painters or poets or storytellers. And if your communication skills are at a high enough level, I think it's I think it's the inoculation against AI. I think that superior communication skills immunize you against the robot overlords seizing your job and your livelihood. It's because at the root of all communications is our feeling of having a human connection with another human. And that's what makes authentic bonds that last a lifetime. This has been Larry Wilson. I want to thank you for spending this time with me, and I hope you found this information useful. If you're looking for more, you can find it at thewilsonmethod.com. There's a ton of stuff there. In fact, if you want, you can even speak to me because I'm human. Send me an email at info at WilsonMethod.com because I read every single one. I hope that you'll join us next week in this continuing journey. And you'll be with me for the next episode of How to Talk to Humans.