Make way for the centaur-managers

Fear of innovation is part of human history. The fear that it will change us and make us into something else. It has sometimes taken some amusing turns, which put today’s AI into perspective. Far from falling into the opposite trap, Marcos Lima encourages teachers to grasp the nettle of this fear, so that tomorrow’s managers are in phase with their times.

Marcos Lima
Research Professor of Marketing and Associate Dean of the SKEMA Business School Transformation Academy, and member of the SKEMA Centre for Artificial Intelligence (SCAI).

The development and adoption rate for AI is unprecedented. Large Language Models (LLMs) like Chat GPT and the use of neural networks to create realistic images (like DALL-E) are transforming the way managers create marketing content, develop creative BUSH’S DREAM Some argue that AI is different: that it is far more powerful than its technological predecessors, that it can replace human intelligence and will thus destroy more jobs than it will ever create. Techno-optimists claim the opposite. Others imagine techno-utopias. business solutions and manage human resources. Faced with these changes, business school teachers may come up against the “fight or flight” instinct. Let’s argue for a third response: they should adopt and adapt these technologies. The real issue is how to prepare management students for these constant and ever-changing professional challenges without their falling into the extremes of moral panic or naïve techno-optimism.

The fear that new tools will inhibit human skills and discourage thinking and learning is as old as civilisation itself. Sites like “The Pessimist’s Archive” catalogue a long list of hysterical reactions to books (“Reading too much fiction may damage our taste”, 1915), radio (“The murder of music”, 1933), television (“Too much TV?”, 1956) and computers (“Cheats are scaring us stiff”, 2000).

Of course, with hindsight, we know that reading books is not a pernicious addiction; that radio has fostered musical creativity, not destroyed it; that watching TV was not akin to “Amusing Ourselves to Death” (the 1985 bestseller by educator Neil Postman) and that computers have become a valuable tool for the productivity of knowledge.

BUSH’S DREAM

Some argue that AI is different: that it is far more powerful than its technological predecessors, that it can replace human intelligence and will thus destroy more jobs than it will ever create. Techno-optimists claim the opposite. Others imagine techno-utopias.

In 1997, Garry Kasparov was beaten by IBM’s Deep Blue in under 20 moves. The following year, he organised the world’s first game of Centaur Chess, with mixed teams of humans and AIs competing against each other. Analogous to the mythical half-man, half-horse creature, “centaur chess players” combined human long-term strategies with a machine’s ability to analyse millions of possible game combinations with each turn: intuition and brute force.

This idea of computers increasing intelligence goes back to Vannevar Bush’s essay, “As we may think” (1945), which predicted that large databases could help humanity find the right information for specific tasks, improving our cognitive capacities for learning and solving problems. More than 20 years later, Douglas Engelbart demonstrated how a computer mouse, hypertext and videoconferencing technologies could help realise Bush’s vision in what was called “the mother of all demonstrations”. Engelbart was one of the first to talk about “augmented intelligence”.

Since then, we’ve taken these tools for granted. We have conquered time and space using computer bits, making inter-human collaboration transparent, whether synchronously or asynchronously. Recent advances in artificial intelligence make this vision of augmented cognition even more tangible: machines are adapted to computing tasks the human brain struggles to perform, while human intelligence remains superior in areas like empathy, aesthetic judgement, the creation of meaning and ethical understanding.

TAKING THE BULL BY THE HORNS

In an increasingly complex world, future leaders will have to operate in highly competitive environments full of volatility and uncertainty. While humans are better at creating abstract frameworks, understanding unsatisfied customer needs, managing people and grasping ethical dilemmas, machines are better at finding invisible data correlations and identifying unsuspected patterns. Combined, these skills can enable “centaur-managers” to make better decisions in terms of product development, become more effective leaders and control resources more efficiently.

Management instructors thus need to embrace AI and strengthen human talents as regards creative and critical thinking. They must encourage students to meet higher standards of ethical transparency and intellectual honesty. Acknowledging the use of AI in class work should be as important as citing sources and using high-qualMarcos Lima ity references. Teachers should reward students who succeed in producing critical and creative results through advanced use of these tools, while discouraging lazy students who hurriedly copy and paste a poorly-written result from a large language model. Collaboration between human colleagues must remain the cornerstone of management students’ projects, but this collaboration can be enriched by the speed and data processing capabilities of AI tools. AI in business schools can lead to more personalised learning, to better case studies with more complex simulations and scenarios, and to predictive analytics.

As technology evolves, teachers will need to be as eager to learn as their students. They should be open to incorporating new tools, experimenting with new methods and trying out innovative approaches to teaching and learning. This is not the end of civilisation, as some predict, but the beginning of a new era of augmented intelligence based on human-machine cognitive partnerships.