As progress hits us and the shockwave of our own advancement divides us, one thing seems certain: escaping artificial intelligence has become almost impossible. The question is no longer how to avoid it, but what place we want to give it without losing ourselves along the way. Like Bob and Charlotte’s Tokyo, fascinating yet strange, surrounded by information that slips away just as we try to grasp it, we converse with increasingly intelligent systems. We give them more and more space in our lives and run the risk of losing ourselves in the limbo of a world between human and AI. Our singularity, our critical thinking, our creativity, our independent thinking, and our judgment seem increasingly intangible. Everything that makes us unique individuals is being tested by this new relationship we are living with the machine.

At numaH, we cannot deny the positive impact AI has had on our work. Thanks to the amount of information we can now process, we have gained in quality, detail, and precision. More than a productivity gain, AI has allowed us to go further.

We see it in our candidate searches, in our thinking, and in the writing of our Executive Search and Talent Management reports. AI has also allowed us to be truly present during interviews: freed from note-taking, we can focus fully on the candidate and form a more accurate impression.

We will therefore not discuss here the benefits and advantages that artificial intelligence can bring, but will instead explore the other side of the coin.

And while at first all this seemed to us like a revolution, a new world opening infinitely before us, once the excitement of everything that had become possible had passed, we began to notice something else. Little by little, the uniqueness and personality of our work, but also of our reports, seemed to fade. Our spark and our individuality gradually gave way to a form of uniformity reminiscent of the sheep in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. Nearly a century earlier, he was already questioning the place of the human being in an increasingly industrialized world.

Today, what we have begun to industrialize is thought.

As we use the same tools, the same models, and sometimes the same reasoning, we risk seeing our ideas converge. We gradually lose confidence in our own judgment. Our creativity fades behind the need for validation. The machine, meant to enrich our thinking, begins to give it a direction, and we have begun to follow the movement it dictates.

But in Chaplin’s film, the question goes beyond the simple dehumanization of work linked to industrialization. It questions the place of progress in our lives and its relationship to happiness. For if progress is often confused with happiness, it is nevertheless only a false synonym. What place does it occupy in our lives? Or rather, should we ask, what place do we allow it to occupy?

Progress is rooted in a deeply human need for freedom, because through it we can free ourselves from certain constraints, improve ourselves, and go further. Yet even if progress can bring us more freedom, reality sometimes seems more nuanced.

Like an addiction, AI has become indispensable to our daily lives. And the price of the space we give it is part of our humanity. We become one among many, our choices all guided by the same algorithm, if choices still exist. Progress has accelerated our lives and we seem to be running after it, but what remains of meaning?

We become men, yet ever less human in the Platonic sense of the word, and no longer seem to know how to be. Like the prisoners in Plato’s cave, we may end up confusing representations with reality, information with understanding, and answers with knowledge. We have returned to the cave of illusion and must relearn how to leave it.

Since the dawn of time, progress has been questioned by society. It seems worth asking whether it is really progress that should be questioned, rather than our ability to manage change. How can we go against something that makes us better, smarter, and faster? When going against it is almost an illusion, we must learn to go with it, without surrendering to it.

The real challenge for companies is not AI, but preserving human intelligence within their teams. Because in a world where everyone has the same tools, the advantage goes to those who can still think, decide, and create with individuality.

The challenge is not to renounce technology, but to give it back its rightful place. We must develop everyone’s critical thinking and learn to leave the tool in the place that is its own. That of a tool. Because, when used wisely, AI can become a powerful lever for creativity and learning.

At numaH, we have decided to be more sensitive to this limit, because our work is essentially human. It consists in understanding individuals, their potential, and their place within organizations. We do not deliver simple analyses to our clients, but human understanding. It is this understanding that we strive to bring to our clients, to support them as best as possible in their decisions.

Like a secret whispered into someone's ear, let us learn to keep what is ours alone.

(At the end of Lost in Translation, Bob whispers a secret to Charlotte that the viewer will never hear.)

By Bérénice Depeursinge Librandi