I set out to study which jobs should be done by AI – and found a very human answer | Allison Pugh

When I interviewed a nurse practitioner in California about what she cherished most about nursing, it was the “human element” of being present with others. “I think we all just want acknowledgment of our suffering, even if you can’t cure it or do anything about it,” she told me.

She still remembered when a homeless man came into her clinic, his back hunched, feet gnarled and callused from being on the streets for years, and she “just sat and did wound care for his feet”. The moment stood out for her, in part because the opportunity to take that kind of time is getting rarer in clinics and hospitals as drives for efficiency impose time constraints.

Washing his feet captured what nursing was about for her: the humility, the service, the witnessing. “Just to give him that moment of ‘I’m seeing you, I’m acknowledging you, this is me caring for you’,” she said. “It was powerful for both of us.”

What is the value of being seen by another human being, outside of your friends and family? What happens when people connect with one another in the everyday encounters of civic life or commerce, and why is that important? Amid the rapid spread of efficiency campaigns, ceaseless data-collecting and AI in connecting jobs such as therapy or teaching, these questions have never been more urgent.

The benefits of human interactions have long eluded measurement, making them easy to ignore, while the skills of connecting to others have long been presumed to be innately feminine, making them easy to devalue. As a social scientist, I spent five years researching these connections to see how and why they are important, and how people forge them in different settings. All sorts of occupations – from teaching, therapy and primary care, to sales, management and the law – rely on seeing others to help students learn, patients heal, or consumers buy.

In fact, the doctor-patient relationship has been shown to have a stronger effect on healthcare outcomes than taking a daily aspirin to ward off heart attacks, while the therapist’s connection to clients has a greater impact than the particular therapeutic tradition they adhere to. Reflective, witnessing work is so important that it deserves its own name: after five years of interviewing and observing scores of practitioners and their clients at work, I’ve come to call it “connective labour”.

Connective labour may enable the contemporary service economy, but it serves as more than some sort of engine grease for the outcomes we value, such as understanding algebra, managing diabetes or learning how to control anxiety. Instead, seeing and being seen has its own powerful effects, for individuals and for their communities. University of Sussex researchers, for instance, demonstrated that people who paused to interact with their baristas experienced more gains to wellbeing than those who breezed right by. It is critical that we drill down into these effects: as people race to replace connective labour with its mechanised forms, we need to understand what we all risk losing.

First, when people see one another, it helps to create dignity, by conveying simply that they are worthy of being seen by another person. I spoke to a woman named Mariah who ran a programme that taught entrepreneurial skills to ex-prisoners in California by having them meet mentors in small groups. She said that it took a while for the men to become comfortable with the attention. “Like, [they ask] ‘You mean, you just want to know about what I think? Like we’re just going to be talking about what I want to do?’” The programme helped to transform the men through the power of human attention.

The power of human attention to inspire others may be a truism, but it is perhaps less well-known that these effects go both ways. “It’s a trusting relationship,” Jenna, a primary care physician, told me. “That trust imbues the relationship with almost a power, a sanctity – there’s just something about it. I feel really honoured and lucky that I get to do that. It gives me just as much as I give to people.”

Finally, people help others better understand themselves. “I think each kid needs to be seen, like, really seen,” Bert, a school principal, said. “I don’t think a kid really gets it on a deep level; I don’t think they are really bitten by the information or the content until they feel seen by the person they’re learning from.”

These kind of results – dignity, purpose, understanding – are profound for the individuals involved. But being seen can also have broader impact. A recent study of formerly incarcerated people in Chicago found that interpersonal recognition from local community leaders helped them feel that they fitted in; one ex-inmate said she knew now that she had “something valuable to say”. Who is seen and who is not has political ramifications, as the sense of being overlooked may drive populist rage, while being recognised promotes the feelings of belonging that knit communities together.

Of course, human beings also misrecognise each other, as judgment and bias can poison these interactions, drawing out shame in moments of considerable vulnerability. But as therapists told me, if people seek only to avoid shame – say by opting for an AI companion or counsellor – then they might never be free of it. Although shame is piercing in human interactions, it is something to walk through together, rather than run from. Part of the very power of human interaction comes from the risks involved when we reveal ourselves to each other.

Connective labour has profound consequences for individuals and for our society, and yet it is under siege by data analytics, which is drowning practitioners in its requirements to collect and measure, and under threat from AI, which is increasingly behind automated therapy, teaching and other novelties. For some, AI might be better than nothing, while others view AI as better than humans – yet both opt for technology to solve problems largely created by inadequate staffing and unremitting drives for efficiency, and both reflect the fact that what humans actually do for each other is not well understood.

Instead, we need to preserve and protect these personal interactions. We need to bolster the working conditions of connective labour practitioners so they are able to see others well. We need to impose a “connection criterion” to help us decide which AI to encourage – the kind that creates new antibiotics, for instance, or decodes sperm whale language – and which to put the brakes on, that is, the kind that intervenes in human relationships. Each of us needs to decide how much we value the human connections in our lives and the lives of our neighbours.