Motivating people working in AI-rich environments (where many operations are actually driven by AI) is a new challenge. Some researchers work on this issue though, as explained in this interesting Fast Company article ‘Why organizations might want to design and train less-than-perfect AI‘
While it is clear that in the future, value will be created by close collaboration between humans (very strong for creative tasks) and AI (very strong for repetitive tasks). Refer to our post ‘How We Need to Learn to Work with AI‘ for example. What is new here is the idea that AI itself must be adapted to fit this human interaction in the way it behaves.
“Giving too much authority to AI systems can unintentionally reduce human motivation.” How can we retain motivation? According to some Stanford research, the trick is to rely on the fact that “decision-making authority incentivizes employees to work hard“. Therefore, “there may be times when—even if the AI can make a better decision than the human—you might still want to let humans be in charge because that motivates them to pay attention“
The deal is not to have the best AI, but a slightly imperfect AI or an AI that asks humans for directions and instructions are well timed moments may be the best approach for a harmonious human interface.