How the human brain beats artificial intelligence…or why I like going to meetings

As the title suggests, in this post I am going to try to tackle three things: meetings, the human brain, and digital intelligence. Bear with me.

I go to meetings, like most of you. They make up a small, but significant part of my work, when I’m not doing background research, writing reports, and travelling. I actually like meetings. This is not just because, in my line of work as a freelance consultant, you develop a real appreciation for periodic human contact, but because meetings – when they focus on specific goals or have a clear agenda – can be extremely productive. In the case of interviews, which is the form a lot of my meetings take (the other types are team meetings and policy discussions), they are the probably most efficient way of obtaining the information you need when I’m evaluating a program, a project, a sector, or some topic.

What are the alternatives to these meetings,  to learn new things? Mostly culling information from reports, books, and, of course, the internet, mostly via a search engine or social media. A large amount of Google’s search engine activity now uses artificial intelligence (AI). (I like to think of AI as just the latest manifestation of brainless intelligence, but that’s another blog topic.) Yes, the internet has made our lives a lot easier. But we’re fooling ourselves if we think everything that’s knowable can be found at the click of a mouse.

But before I get to this, yes, I am aware of the complaints. I’ve read a lot about how office meetings are unproductive, a waste of time and money, and brain cells. That may be so in the private sector or in management, areas where I am quite happy not to work. However, I find meeting with other people extremely valuable, for two reasons. First, it is a quick and efficient way to learn the most important thing about an issue. Second, it promotes cooperation, through relationship-building. And without cooperation, things tend to fall to pieces. (I’ll try to get to that in yet another blog post).  For now, I’ll focus on why holding meetings is great for information gathering and, in some important ways, much better than Google. Why? It comes down to this – humans are exposed to, immersed in, and able to reflect upon a breathtakingly large amount of real world experiences, interactions, visual stimuli and sensations.  We also feel and use our judgement. This is something computers and artificial intelligence can hardly do, despite the recent advances so breathlessly talked up in the media. In fact, search engines are limited to what they can find on servers.

I am not a fan of the reductive approach, e.g. reducing the human mind, or the soul, to biological impulses to be digitally mimicked. But I think there is a useful comparison to make. Strides in computing power and artificial intelligence notwithstanding, humans still have some serious comparative advantages. You can read online about how the human brain compares to a supercomputer, with some saying it has been surpassed, and others saying, not yet, not by a long shot. There are also some interesting comparisons and discussions regarding the human brain vis á vis search engines, especially Google.

You’ll see that, in a narrow sense and along quantitative parameters, search engines may be superior: processing power to retrieve keywords, access to data, speed, etc. But here is one parameter where computer search engines don’t perform anywhere near as well as humans – they are limited to the written, numerical and recorded, information they can find online. That misses out on a huge amount of information.  What might that be? Well, everything that isn’t recorded: conversations, events, personal notes, observations of others, email exchanges (that Google doesn’t have access to), and so on. An expert or stakeholder who is engaged in the field you are studying – whether it be education policy in the Maldives, the Uzbekistan irrigation sector, energy efficiency in Ukraine – will be able to draw on a depth and breadth of information that the most powerful search engine in the world can only dream of (if androids could dream of electric sheep, that is). Although the information stored on all the world’s servers is vast and growing, it is still a fraction of all the information in the world and inside the heads of its population.

Ask your interlocutor, your key informant (the term used in evaluation) a question, and he or she will be able to draw on countless, non-digital, resources in order to answer you. Google is limited to giving you what it finds on the web. Certainly useful, but limited. Humans still have some value, it seems. That is why meeting them, if you ask good questions, is so invaluable. If you are an evaluator, an investigator, a journalist, or in a similar line of work, you quickly realize that you get more from holding a few meetings with key individuals than from plowing through hundreds or thousands of pages of documents.

Caveats, caveats. There are always caveats. So yes, it is true that not everyone’s memory functions at an optimal level. And some key informants, you quickly realize, don’t have much to say. Or maybe you find yourself talking to the wrong person. And, naturally, you still need to consult the thematic literature, the reports and journal articles and so on, to complement the meetings you hold. But overall – as a professional, doing my job, I’ll keep going to those meetings. And here’s a(n open) secret: most people actually like to talk about what they do and what they know. Most are happy to share.  Also they don’t show you those annoying ads before answering your questions…