Human Connection is the Ultimate Competence in the Age of AI
What to do when LLMs are more competent than you in your job?
The past week or so, you'd have probably read that viral LinkedIn post, about how meritocracy is not a thing in Indonesia -- that being competent matters less than being connected.
"Why be smart when you can be rich?" That's a nonsensical question. That's like asking, why have steak when you can have dessert? And, for some of you, all you have is the budget for a nasi goreng.
The better questions are: How can you be rich if you don't have rich parents? How can you be "rich" if you aren't "smart"?
Get rich or die trying
Let's orient ourselves.
Merely asserting that "connection trumps competence" is not helpful. Let's put more dimensionality into this to navigate the terrain:
a. The Undervalued (incompetent and unconnected): You're invisible. Takes the most effort to solve. And sadly, yes this is the majority of the population. It's easy to just give up or find excuses for how you're underprivileged or why you can't be competent, but you HAVE to start somewhere. Remember: integrity, curiosity, and tenacity are also competencies.
b. The Forgotten (competent and not connected): Easiest to solve. Work on building the connection. The best way to build genuine connection (as opposed to shallow "networking") is to be a competent person -- a person of value. And more importantly: learn how to CONVEY how your competence can help the people you want to connect with.
c. The Elite (competent and connected): Best case scenario. Can we use AI to help boost this population rather than to atrophy them?
d. The Nepo Class (incompetent and connected): Worst case scenario, especially if these are the people in power 😉😉. Whoever benefits from you staying incompetent and feeling powerless is the enemy -- and this includes yourself. Do something. Destroy them.
You build connection through competence. And then build that competence through more connections. Or the other way around. It's all a journey.
You die only when you stopped trying, and you'll die in a worse condition if you don't try at all. Well OK, you'll die anyway so why not have a bit of adventure?
Connection and competence are proxies of trust
As someone born and educated in Indonesia, I had two initial thoughts after reading the article:
a) Wow, I must have lived in such a bubble because, thankfully, that's not my experience at all.
I had absolutely no connection, yet I managed to get to many many good places anyway. But I soon realized, I am such a ultra-maxi minority in the paths I've followed.
Sure, I have operated half of my career in local companies and the next half in a global team, but Tech is an outlier of a field where competence usually still matters more than connection, even in Indonesia. And all the different factors combined, I'm likely a demographic of one.
b) I don't think this is a phenomenon that's unique to only Indonesia. Yes I understand that it’s more about the degree to which this is happening, and I’m curious to see good data from any study on this topic.
It's not a secret that developed countries are more meritocratic, but I think part of it is because connection is a proxy to vet for competence. And this is something that less developed (and competent) countries can't afford to do at scale. We need a currency for trust. And we need trust for coordination.
So connection is the native hack that those without competence need to deploy to coordinate people at scale.
We know the real problem is that some systems are exploiting this hack longer than necessary for benefit of certain group of people. But don't hate the player, hate the game.
That said, you can't argue that connection matters even in the most meritocratic society ("nepobaby" anyone?).
This leads us to the next point: human connection is how you stand out in the age of "AI".
Human connection is the ultimate competence
So we have revisited some ideas. We have looked at a set of better questions at the beginning of the article.
The most relevant question now is: Why be smart if AI, and specifically, large language models (LLMs), can be "smarter"?
It's quite late in this discussion, but we haven't defined competence. So let me ask you: what do you think it means when you think "I need to grow more competencies"?
If you are our typical knowledge workers --- aka people who gets paid to sit in front of screens, type, generate shapes and languages, and deliver them through digital interfaces, you'd have answered something like: coding, writing, designing, or managing.
You know where this is going: these "competencies" won't prevail because those are EXACTLY the things LLMs are good at now.
LLM is already smarter than most knowledge workers in their most deterministic and predictable day to day tasks.
But here's the plot twist: it's going to be a while for LLMs to connect with human in your life. LLMs cannot talk to people in your team. LLMs don't have the context window (non techies: working memory capacity) to understand your whole project and retrieve them intelligently and contextually. LLMs can't decipher the subtext in your team's dynamic, your manager's mind, or your customer's real problem. LLMs exist in the metaspace. You're in the meatspace.
Perhaps this very human "bug" of overindexing on connection could be our edge to rule in this age of AI.
Being connected to fellow human is a legitimate form of competency. Being liked is a competency. Being trusted is a competency. And knowing how to code / write /design / manage is sometimes just part of building the trust. Human connection is an asset.
Those who are competently connected will find it easier to weather the AI disruption.
Some personal anecdotes to end with
Out of the seven jobs I've had so far, only one had materialized through a referral (and I went through a period of working together before finally getting fully on board).
And here's the punch line: My accumulated social capital didn't even help me negotiate 10% extra for an offer at one of these jobs --- which was absolutely annoying and almost insulting ;). I suppose you could say I've escaped the humongous nepotistic bear trap in Indonesia and yet managed to step on this tiny tiny meritocratic landmine.
Why be smart when you can be rich? I'd love to be smart and rich please. Of course part of me believed I need to be smart because I want to be rich. But I'm sure that I'd still be excellently nerdy when I'm rich because I'm born that way. Who can relate? Let's be friends.