"Are human inherently selfish that we need to be cautious toward the system that built?"
Starting the first day in New York University as graduate student, I was assigned to read one of the articles from Harvard Business Review that catches my attention because of the statement that says humans are inherently selfish1. My first reaction toward it was frown and objected it, because I believe that human were made with love and virtues from God. By chance prior to class, Dr. Anna Tavis assigned us to complete the personality assessment by Wasserman Center, which intrinsically review our strengths. For during the class we are going to talk about Personality, and this is where I could find another perspective in understanding why Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Dave Winsborough wrote the article.
At class, we discussed about personality based on Hogan's interview video. Some people hardly defined it, and the others led to a conclusion that it's core characteristics which make us socially distinctive2. For me, personality, just like the various colors I used, it is unique and diverse traits that each of the person has, even the twins can have different personalities. Therefore, it is complex to be learnt but thanks to developed theory and technology we have there are various assessments tools, for instance MBTI, DISC, The Big Five Personality Tests (OCEAN), and Johari's Window. However, there are also some debates about which tool is better or worser than another3.
There were various reactions toward the personality assessment results that we had taken. Some of my classmates thought that the result is dismissive and out of context. According to Dr. Tavis, the personality test can be unpredictable although the tools had been built based on systematically behaviour predictive. We also need to be aware of the pigeonhole tendency. In my opinion, the personality can change overtime and there is no such tools that can predict our behaviours perfectly and coherently, yet. If someone thinks that they know their selves more than anybody, I think there can also be a bias in which someone hesitate about the test results.
To add it up, personality is subjective to the "privilege circumstance". I use the butterfly as the illustration. The butterfly’s mother choose selectively to lay her eggs on the right kind of leaves, so when the egg hatches and a caterpillar emerges, it can eat and grow continually well. It is just like our closest community, family. Our parents might raise us generously and considerably to make sure that we have the best educational access and environment to grow up, and some might unfortunate to experience that. To answer the question in the beginning, "are we inherently selfish?", I would say it depends to the "privilege" we have in our life.
Another topic during class that catches me interesting is about how technology works within our society and the way we live. Technology can be beneficial for the human beings, like how it simplifies and eliminates administrative tasks, or robotic technology that can treats the seniors or someone with illness if they do not have someone to take care of them. However, the technology also has some limitations. From the Netflix movies, The Social Dilemma, it exposed some terrific facts and conditions about its immoral and failures. The technology might be misused to violent users' data privacy by taking and selling our data to other companies, or even the competitors. To prevent it, the users might need to create another AI system to guard the data, but it will also come with investment of money and time.
Another limitation due to its capabilities in generalizing data. Currently, Artificial Empathy (AE) or Emotion AI technologies are being used by companies to replace the customer service. It resulted in eliminating jobs for many people in that field. The systems claim to have better accuracy in recognizing, understanding, and simulating the human emotions, but I usually ended up in getting bad experiences. For instance, recently I tried to install the internet service and the company has implemented such AI customer service. In my case, it's very different from the usual patterns of issues that frequently asked. I couldn't install the internet because the black box wasn't there, and someone (technician) should come to install it instead! The AI customer service couldn't get what I mean and unfortunately the website didn't let me easily talking with real person. With suggestion from my friend who is working in Marketing field, I reached out the social media team and the problem solved instantly with technician scheduled.
Emotions (personality) and technology are two distinctive things, but somehow it has connecting dot. Technology is made by humans, and humans surely have emotions and personalities. If someone create technology for good purpose, it will deliver good values that can help the society grow. However, if the technology is created for greedy purpose, it will turn to be destructive. Quoting from the Director of LSE, Minouche Shafik, "in the past jobs are about the muscle, now they are about brains, but in the future they'll be about the heart". I would agree to these, because in the future where the technology is more advanced and AI rapidly use by the society, we need humans' hearts to stay connect with the good values and purposes, for the sake of humanity.
Then we can reflect once again, are we inherently selfish?
What's pigeonhole tendency?