Michelle: Mark, a study of nearly 14,000 college students found that empathy levels plummeted 40% in just a few decades. The biggest drop happened after the year 2000. Mark: Whoa. So, right when we all got smartphones and social media. It sounds like the technology that was supposed to connect us is actually breaking our ability to care about each other. Michelle: Exactly. And that's the central paradox at the heart of Geoffrey Colvin's fantastic book, Humans Are Underrated: What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will. Mark: Colvin... isn't he the senior editor-at-large for Fortune magazine? So he's not some philosopher in an ivory tower; he's seeing this from the front lines of business and technology. Michelle: Precisely. He’s been a leading voice on business trends for years, and this book really grew out of his work exploring the future of work. He kicks it all off with a personal story of humiliation that perfectly sets the stage for this entire debate. Mark: Humiliation? I’m listening. Michelle: He agreed to go on stage at a massive conference and play Jeopardy! against IBM's Watson, the supercomputer that had already crushed the game's greatest human champions. Mark: Oh, that’s a bad idea. That’s like volunteering to arm-wrestle a forklift. Michelle: It went about as well as you'd expect. He describes standing there, frantically trying to buzz in, while Watson just calmly rattled off correct answers. He got one particularly brutal clue wrong and just felt this wave of public humiliation. But in that moment, he had a profound realization: we shouldn't even be trying to compete with machines on their terms. We’ll lose. The real question is, what can we do that they can't?

Mark: That’s a terrifying and brilliant question. Because it feels like the list of things they can't do is getting shorter every single day. Where does Colvin even start to answer that? Michelle: He starts by showing us that the skills we need most are the very ones we're letting fade away. And he illustrates this with one of the most incredible experiments I've read in a long time. It involved a group of 51 sixth-graders in Southern California. Mark: Okay, sixth-graders. The epicenter of social drama. What did they do? Michelle: Researchers first measured the kids' typical screen time. Outside of school, they were spending about four and a half hours a day texting, watching TV, and playing video games. Then, they took them to a traditional, no-devices-allowed nature camp for five days. Mark: I can hear the groans from here. Five days without their phones? That’s an eternity at that age. Michelle: It is! They were hiking, learning to use a compass, doing archery—all face-to-face activities. Before they went, the psychologists tested their ability to read nonverbal emotional cues from photos and videos. They tested them again when they came back. Mark: And let me guess, there was a difference. Michelle: A massive difference. After just five screen-free days, their ability to recognize emotions like happiness, sadness, and anger in others improved significantly. The researchers were stunned. One of them said, and this is a quote that stuck with me, "It’s as if that emotional savvy was inside them just waiting for a chance to get out." Mark: Wow. Just five days. That's incredible. It’s like the skill was dormant, just waiting to be woken up. It wasn't lost, just... asleep. Michelle: Exactly. And it highlights the book's core paradox: the economy is screaming for more people with high-level social skills, but our daily habits are systematically starving us of the practice we need to develop them. We're living in an increasingly virtual, cognitive world, and it's making us less human. Mark: Okay, reading faces is one thing. But how does this 'withering' of skills show up in the real world, in our jobs? Does it really matter if I can't tell if my coworker is slightly annoyed over Zoom? Michelle: It matters immensely, and in ways we don't even realize. Colvin brings up these fascinating psychology experiments that show how disconnected we're becoming from our physical senses, which are deeply tied to our social judgments. In one study, they had people assemble a simple puzzle. Half the group got smooth pieces, the other half got pieces covered in rough sandpaper. Mark: Okay, weird, but I'm following. Michelle: Afterwards, they all read a vague story about a social interaction between two people. The people who had handled the rough sandpaper rated the interaction as more adversarial, more competitive, and more argumentative. Mark: No way. Just from touching sandpaper? Michelle: Just from that. In another experiment, people who evaluated a job candidate's resume on a heavy clipboard rated the candidate as more serious and better overall than people who read the exact same resume on a light clipboard. Mark: That is insane. So my brain is making these huge social judgments based on whether something feels rough or heavy? It makes you wonder what's being lost when our most important interactions happen through a smooth, weightless screen. Michelle: That's the point. We're losing all that rich, sensory data that our brains evolved over millennia to use. A handshake, a shared space, even the subtle weight of a document—these things shape our interactions. Colvin argues that as we move more of our lives online, we're essentially operating with a blindfold on, missing the very cues that build trust, rapport, and genuine understanding. And this is happening right at the moment when those skills are becoming our primary economic value.

Mark: So if our human skills are fading just when we need them most, how do we prove they're still more powerful than a supercomputer? It feels like a losing battle. We've got Watson winning at Jeopardy, AI creating art... where's the hope? Michelle: The hope lies in understanding that the most complex problems aren't solved by raw processing power. They're solved by humans interacting. Colvin gives this incredible historical example that became the origin story for the movie Top Gun. Mark: I'm in. Talk to me, Goose. Michelle: In the early years of the Vietnam War, the U.S. Navy had the F-4 Phantom, a fighter jet that was technologically light-years ahead of the North Vietnamese MiGs. It had better radar, better missiles, it was faster. On paper, it was no contest. Mark: But in reality? Michelle: In reality, they were getting slaughtered. The kill ratio was a dismal 2-to-1. For every two MiGs they shot down, they were losing one of their own multi-million dollar jets and a pilot. The technology wasn't working. The advanced missiles were failing over 90% of the time. Mark: So the superior machine was failing. What did they do? Michelle: This is the genius part. The Navy didn't order a better jet. They created a new kind of school, the Navy Fighter Weapons School—Top Gun. They brought their best pilots back from combat and had them fly against other pilots in planes that mimicked the enemy's tactics. They created realistic, high-stakes simulations. But the real magic happened after the flying. Mark: The After-Action Review, or AAR. Michelle: Exactly. After every single dogfight, everyone—from the hotshot instructor to the rookie pilot—would sit in a room and break down what happened, frame by frame. There were no ranks. A junior officer could tell a commander, "Sir, you made a mistake here, and it got you 'killed'." The entire process was built on brutal, unvarnished candor. Mark: So the AAR is basically a no-ego zone. It’s not about blame, it's about getting better. That's the opposite of most corporate meetings! Michelle: It's the total opposite. And the results were staggering. The Navy's kill ratio skyrocketed from 2-to-1 to over 12-to-1. The Air Force, which didn't adopt this human-centric training, saw their ratio stay flat. It was definitive proof: training, empathy—understanding your opponent and your teammates—and honest interaction trumped technology. Mark: That is such a powerful story. It shows that the value isn't in the machine, it's in the interaction between the humans using the machine. Do we see this in the business world too? Michelle: Absolutely. Take Bank of America's call centers. They were obsessed with efficiency, measuring every second of every call. Employees worked in solitary cubicles and even had their breaks staggered to maximize productivity. Mark: Sounds like a fun place to work. Michelle: Right? But a research team from MIT came in and had employees wear these "sociometric badges" that measured their interaction patterns. They found something that shocked the managers: the single biggest predictor of a team's productivity wasn't individual skill or speed. It was how much the team members talked to each other. The most productive teams were the ones who were constantly interacting. Mark: So all that enforced isolation was actually hurting their performance. Michelle: Massively. The researchers made a simple, almost laughably counter-intuitive suggestion: let an entire 20-person team take their coffee break at the same time. Mark: The managers must have thought they were crazy. That's scheduled "unproductive" time. Michelle: They did. But they tried it. And productivity in that group shot up. The employees used the time to share tips, vent about tough calls, and build rapport. They learned from each other. Bank of America rolled out team-based breaks to all its call centers, and they estimated the move would save them $15 million a year. Mark: All from a shared coffee break. It proves that human connection isn't a 'soft skill'; it's a hard-and-fast economic asset. Michelle: And it's not just about talking, it's about how we communicate. Colvin dives deep into the power of storytelling. He tells the story of Stephen Denning at the World Bank, who was trying to convince the organization to become a "knowledge bank" and share its expertise with the world. Mark: I can imagine how that went. He probably showed up with a 100-slide PowerPoint deck. Michelle: He did, and it failed miserably. No one cared. So he changed his approach. He started telling a simple, concrete story: "In June of 1995, a health worker in a small town in Zambia went to the CDC website and got the answer to a question about treating malaria. My question is, why wasn't he going to the World Bank for that information?" Mark: Oh, that's good. That's a story. It has a character, a problem, and a moral. Michelle: It completely changed the conversation. People's brains lit up. He wasn't selling a concept anymore; he was sharing a vision. Research shows that when we hear a story, our brains engage in something called 'neural coupling.' The listener's brain patterns start to mirror the storyteller's. It literally syncs you up with the other person. Mark: Hold on, you mentioned 'neural coupling' when talking about stories. What does that actually mean in plain English? Does my brain literally sync up with yours? Michelle: In a way, yes! When I tell you a story, the parts of your brain that process sights, sounds, and emotions activate in the same patterns as mine. It's the biological basis for empathy. It's why a good story can make you feel what the characters are feeling. It also releases oxytocin, the trust hormone. Logic and data don't do that. A story does. Denning used that power to transform one of the world's largest bureaucracies.

Mark: Okay, so the picture is becoming clear. Technology is making us better at analytical, systemizing tasks, but it's also eroding our natural ability to empathize and interact. And yet, those very human skills—teamwork, storytelling, empathy—are what produce the most extraordinary results. So, what's the one big takeaway here? Are we supposed to throw away our phones and go live in the woods? Michelle: It's not about rejecting technology. It's about being intentional. The book argues that the future doesn't belong to people who can code better than a machine; it belongs to people who can connect, empathize, and collaborate better than a machine. Colvin has this fantastic line that sums it all up: "Being a great performer is becoming less about what we know and more about what we’re like." Mark: I love that. It shifts the focus from your resume to your character. From your hard drive to your heart, in a way. Michelle: Exactly. And the book is ultimately very hopeful. It argues these skills can be rebuilt. It's not just a critique; it's a call to action. And it's interesting because while the book was widely praised for this focus on empathy, some readers did find the first few chapters, which detail all the jobs we're losing, a bit of a slow start. Mark: I can see that. It's like, "Tell me the good news already!" But you need the scary part to understand why the hopeful part matters so much. Michelle: And the good news is that the solutions are deeply human. Colvin suggests something as simple as reading more fiction. Multiple studies have shown that reading literary fiction, where you have to inhabit the minds of complex characters, measurably increases your empathy and ability to understand others. Mark: That's a great, practical tip. It's not about signing up for some expensive seminar. It's about picking up a novel. So, the path to becoming more valuable in the age of AI might run through the local library. Michelle: It just might. It's a fundamental shift in how we think about self-improvement. It's less about cramming more information into our heads and more about cultivating what's already there. Mark: It makes you wonder, in your own life, where has technology created a connection, and where has it created a void? Something to think about. Michelle: A perfect question to end on. Mark: This is Aibrary, signing off.