YOUR MOVE CHIEF

A few weeks ago I met with an investor who held some strongly held beliefs. Early in our conversation we turned to the topic at the forefront of almost every investment discussion these days.

No, not DOGE, Elon, Ukraine, interest rates, tariffs, or Donald Trump, but rather the other one…artificial intelligence.

He confidently proclaimed that,

“AI is going to eliminate countless jobs in areas like the law, accounting, and other white collar professions. Even doctors are going to become irrelevant because people will simply start sharing their symptoms with future versions of ChatGPT to get diagnoses and potential treatments.”

I sat there a little dumbfounded.

I guess I could envision a world in which AI replaces lawyers and accountants, but doctors?

This seemed like a bit of a stretch, but the more I thought about it, the more I began to think he might be onto something. After all, many doctors’ primary responsibility is to make diagnoses and suggest treatments by applying what they learned in medical school, have read in medical journals, and have observed from other patients who have displayed similar symptoms.

Therefore, given the fact that future versions of ChatGPT, Gemini, or Grok are going to have access to infinitely more information than any individual doctor will, including anything ever produced in a medical school’s curriculum or medical journals, as well as countless patient cases, why wouldn’t AI be better at diagnosing and treating future patients?

After slowly convincing myself this guy might be onto something, I suddenly reversed course.

Why?

Because of a couple scenes I remembered from the movie Good Will Hunting.

Huh?

Stay with me. You will see where I am going with this.

Anyone who has seen the Oscar-winning film will remember these scenes.

The first is the one in which Sean Maguire (Robin Williams) and Will Hunting (Matt Damon) are in their first therapy session in Sean’s office.

As the two start talking, Will comes across as extremely arrogant given his extraordinary level of intelligence. He starts rattling off quotes from various philosophers, as well as thoughts about the world and life. Eventually Will discovers a painting hanging on Sean’s wall and begins using it to “flip the script” by psychoanalyzing Sean. Then, seeing his comments struck a chord, Will leans in by diagnosing Sean, saying,

“I think you’re about one step from cutting your ear off. You ever hear the saying, ‘any port in the storm?’ Yeah, maybe that means you. Maybe you’re in the middle of a storm. The sky is fallin’ on your head. The waves are crashin’ over your little boat. The oars are about to snap. You just piss your pants. You’re cryin’ for the harbor. So maybe you do what you gotta do to get out. You know, maybe you became a psychologist. Maybe you married the wrong woman. That’s it, isn’t it? You married the wrong woman. What happened? What, she leave you? Was she banging some other guy?”

To which Sean responds by grabbing Will violently by the throat and saying,

“If you ever disrespect my wife again, I will end you. I will fucking end you. Got that chief?”

Despite being incredibly well-read and possessing an off-the-charts IQ, Will had badly misdiagnosed Sean.

See, Sean’s grief was not a result of his wife cheating on him. In fact, quite the opposite. After battling cancer for a number of years, Sean’s wife had passed away and he was still grieving.

The question is, how did Will misdiagnose Sean so badly? And, what does this have to do with artificial intelligence?

This is where the second scene comes into play.

In this scene, Will and Sean are sitting together on a park bench in the Boston Common. Then, as the camera zooms in on Sean, he begins to describe what had happened in his office a few days earlier. He says to Will (click on this link if you haven’t watched the scene before because it’s much better seen than read),

“I thought about what you said in my office the other day. About my painting. I stayed up half the night thinking about it and you know what occurred to me? You’re just a kid. You haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about. You’ve never been out of Boston. So, if I asked you about art, you’d probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo, you know a lot about him. His life's work, political aspirations, him and the Pope, sexual orientation, the whole works, right? But, I bet you can’t tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You’ve never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling.

If I asked you about women, you’d probably give me a syllabus of your personal favorites. You may have even been laid a few times. But you can’t tell me what it feels like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy.

You’re a tough kid. If I ask you about war, you’d probably throw Shakespeare at me, right? ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends.’ But you’ve never been near one. You’ve never held your best friend’s head in your lap and watched him gasp his last breath looking to you for help.

I’d ask you about love, you’d probably quote me a sonnet. But you’ve never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable. Known someone who could level you with her eyes. Feeling like God put an angel on Earth just for you. Who could rescue you from the depths of hell. And you wouldn’t know what it’s like to be her angel, to have that love for her be there forever. Through anything. Through cancer. And you wouldn’t know about sleeping sitting up in a hospital room for two months holding her hand, because the doctors could see in your eyes that the terms ‘visiting hours’ don’t apply to you.

You don’t know about real loss, because that only occurs when you’ve loved something more than you love yourself. And I doubt you’ve ever dared to love anybody that much.

I look at you, and I don’t see an intelligent, confident man. I see a cocky, scared shitless kid. But you’re a genius, Will. No one denies that. No one could possibly understand the depths of you. But you presume to know everything about me because you saw a painting of mine, and you ripped my fucking life apart.

You’re an orphan, right? Do you think I’d know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are, because I read ‘Oliver Twist’? Does that encapsulate you?

Personally, I don’t give a shit about all that, because you know what? I can’t learn anything from you that I can’t read in some fucking book. Unless you want to talk about you, who you are. And I’m fascinated. I am in. But you don’t want to do that, do you, sport? You’re terrified of what you might say.

Your move, chief.”

Artificial intelligence is today’s version of Will Hunting…supremely intelligent and beyond well-read. Yet, like Will, AI cannot begin to describe what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel from personal experience. It cannot communicate what it is like to wake up next to someone and feel truly happy, to fight in a war, or help someone suffering through cancer.

Ethan Mollick expands on this in his new book, “Co-Intelligence — Living and working with AI,” specifically pointing out a considerable risk associated with moving too quickly into AI,

“While some ‘therapeutic’ AI programs are being designed to create the illusion of a sympathetic human on the other side to comfort people who are suffering or depressed, are we actually just being ‘fooled’ into believing these machines share our feelings? And could this illusion lead us to disclose personal information, not realizing that we are sharing it with corporations?”

Knowing this, while AI is undoubtably a powerful tool, I am skeptical that its best usage will be as a standalone product, in large part because it lacks an emotional quotient (“EQ”).

The fact is, in my experience most of the best professionals, be it lawyers, investors, doctors, or countless other lines of work, have not been successful purely based on their intellect. Rather, their success has been the result of combining their intellect with an equally strong ability to engage with people. Said another way, their EQ is equal or superior to their IQ (intellectual quotient).

This is precisely why many of the best trial lawyers are also great storytellers, why many of the best investors are often excellent communicators (think Warren Buffett, Peter Lynch, Joel Greenblatt, Bill Gurley, Fred Wilson, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz), and why many of the best doctors also tend to have the best “bedside manner.” In short, the best are often the best because they are a combination of Sean and Will.

While AI as a standalone is fraught with issues, it has the potential to become an “intelligence equalizer” for those who are willing and able to leverage it effectively. Said another way, it could elevate people with higher EQs, but lower IQs, to a level currently occupied by those select outliers who possess both.

To those people I say, “Your move chief”.

“Artificial intelligence could agument human intelligence in ways that would help us better understand ourselves and our place in the universe.”

— Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO
WSJ: “AI Could Usher in a New Renaissance”