Is the Role of Humans in Communication in this 4th Industrial Revolution Overrated?

Dispensing with all the preliminaries and formalities, I’ll jump right in and ask; What is a primary differentiator between Communication Professionals of this revolution and of previous revolutions?

Their use of technology, no doubt.

However, while the role of tech — particularly artificial intelligence — has no doubt been significant (and for some, a lifesaver) with regards to the availability of key insight and a variety of perspectives, we will never be able to rely on technology (chatbots, robots or other intelligent machines) to provide intuition, judgment and in some cases, perception/ingenuity.

It is true that efforts have been made and are being made to closely simulate the human emotions in bots today (consider this fair warning if you’ve been on the verge of flirting with Natalie the ‘customer rep’ of XYZ business on their web platform) but these only go so far in addressing communication needs.

While we must acknowledge that these machines are here to stay and evolve, they can only take some of the load off. There’s no risk of them putting human Communication Professionals out of jobs.

The human perspective will always be required to fill in a void, particularly when high-stake situations arise which require negotiations or when the time comes to broker peace between businesses, large organisations or countries; or when there is a PR mess to be cleaned up, etc. These require the human factor. Never have I heard of an entity that opted to set up a machine to bail them out in such scenarios. Unless it was a machine gun that was set up…and that had to have happened on a war field or somewhere similar.

But I digress. Answering my own topical question, I vote ‘No’. The role of humans is most definitely not overrated when it comes to effective and appropriate communication in this fourth industrial revolution. Some might even argue that it’s not made prominent enough; that is, it is quite underrated.

I am coming to terms with the knowledge that there are and will be emergent technologies which may prove that I have spoken too soon in some aspects of this short article. However, in the grand scheme of how messages are expertly crafted and satisfactorily received by the audience, I am convinced that Communicators (and the rest of the world) cannot afford to forget the salient factor that our humanity contributes to making the world a saner place.