4IR and AI? Are our Emotions coming along?

Yesterday I was invited to speak with leaders and educators at a large educational institution - one of the largest in South East Asia. They are embracing the future by teaching children about the Fourth Industrial Revolution and AI which is upon us. They wanted my thoughts on the value of emotional intelligence in their teaching. Being the innovative institution that they are, I suggested they give just as much importance to emotional intelligence as technological advancement since this will be a critical skill especially for the future.

This is what I shared:

Educational institutions should be focusing on emotional intelligence just as much as technological innovation and disruption.

We are beyond the age of the previous Industrial Revolution which was about creating a mindset of workers for the great industrial complex of mass production. We needed more workers who thought more like machines and less like humans. How would the great cogs of mass production keep turning if there were no humans to operate them? Scarcity and the hope of riches for all were strong motivators to join the revolution

In this age and for the future, we don't need more humans thinking like machines. We want free thinking individuals who are free to be themselves and ascribe to higher principles by knowing themselves and their purpose. We must move beyond serving the corporation and the industrial drivers of progress to serving the greater good for each other and the planet at large.

We must teach people HOW to think, rather than WHAT to think.

We are building machines that will think and behave more like us yet we are becoming less human and more like them already.

We are all focused on the next disruptive technology but is this at the expense of disrupting our emotional intelligence? How can we invent and create anything new if our thinking is shaped by machine perception? Inspiration comes from a different part of us.

How will we know the difference between us and them? Would we care?

Are we teaching our students to be better machines or better humans?

I’m excited about progress in innovation and technology. If it wasn’t for it, this post wouldn’t have been read by such a global and diverse audience. We just need to be aware that our thoughts, emotions, inspiration, intuition and feelings are what ultimately drive our progress and growth and purpose. Developing superior emotional intelligence is just as important, if not more important than technological innovation alone.

We teach machines how to be like us by mimicking our external senses. There is one thing that differentiates humans from machines that cant be replicated:

The existence of the human soul,. The seat of emotions and the reason why we do anything of meaning.

Our souls speak a unique language which machines could never comprehend.

Don't you think it is time to move from sense-perception to soul-perception?

In the eternal words of Jallaaludin Rumi he speaks to our soul:

“The Soul has been given its own ears to hear things that the mind does not understand!”

“Listen with the ears of Tolerance,  See through the eyes of compassion, Speak with the language of love”

“The very centre of your heart is where life begins - The most beautiful place on earth”

Rishad Ahmed has over 20 years of business and education experience. He is a business coach, mentor and keynote speaker. Contact him at zencoachsa@gmail.com to re-think your future and your present.