How artificial intelligence risks making you more artificial and less intelligent.

90% of the people who replied to my LinkedIn update did it unconsciously, unaware of what they were doing.

Ever noticed those short semi-automated responses and emojis LinkedIn offers you on a silver plate? Using these automated responses, which are actually dictated by a computer system, can seriously limit your ability to think consciously and hinder your emotional intelligence if you do not pay attention, and here is why...?

The Experiment

The experiment consisted of making an unconventional use of the automated notification on LinkedIn (which can be triggered when you update your profile) with a declared intent to advertise my availability for a new role.

Background

I was made redundant earlier this year, and after updating my profile accordingly, I kept getting these bugging messages from LinkedIn asking me to enter my new position in my header. But I didn't have a new position yet! So I thought:

Why not writing a short update on the "experience" section of my profile, stating my current availability, and sharing it with my network to see how it goes?

I trust I am not the first person to think about it, and to be honest, my expectations of landing a new role this way were very low. However, I found the idea interesting to test the level of responsiveness, involvement, and interaction of my 14K+ members' strong network. I regularly share articles relevant to my industry on LinkedIn, own a few hashtags and have a decent base of followers. But this was a direct interaction with my first-degree contacts.

Step by step process

So went editing my experience as per the below, looking for a title that would leave no ambiguity about my current status. The company field is mandatory, so I simply entered "Your Company?", and I kept the description as brief as possible, remaining deliberately vague on the kind of role (whether as consultant, full-time or part-time employee, or volunteer) and finishing with a call-to-action. Finally, I switched on the magical "Share with network" button and press "Saved".

Bang!

The new "experience" immediately showed up on my profile. The "Your company?" was looking a bit odd, but apart from that, the end result was serving its purpose.

In the meantime, the 14,607 professionals of my network would receive an email notification asking them to congratulate me for starting a new position, just like so:

Even though the "starting a new position" was completely misleading, I was hoping that the ending of the sentence was weird and intriguing enough to trigger a profile check rather than a direct congrats message.

Besides the automated email, the recipients would also get a notification when they log into their LinkedIn profile (the little bell icon on the top menu bar). And when you click on "Say congrats", it will open one of these chat windows with the person in question and pre-fill it with:

Congrats on the new role!

You still have to press "Send" so that your recipient gets the message, which allows you to actually edit the wording and personalize it. You can also view the recipient profile at this stage, before sending anything, by just clicking on the recipient's name. As simple as that.

A note on the timing: I chose to conduct this experiment in the second half of August to be less disruptive for my network, as I knew a good chunk of my contacts would be on leave, taking some time off with their family.

The outcome

Minutes after posting that I am currently looking for a new role, I got bombarded by private messages congratulating me on my new position. The responses all happened within 48 hours of the posting.

I received a total of 160 messages (over 1% of my connections) out of which 145 replied by using the 2-click automated response (90% of the respondents).

I have sent a private message to each of these 145 contacts as follows:

Thanks but I am actually looking for a new role.

48 messages remain unanswered after that (roughly 1/3rd). The majority of other replies received were (by decreasing frequency):

• Good luck!
• Oh, OK
• Oh, really?
• ??
• ??

(all these pre-written messages being again readily available 1-click answers, similar to the blue text you can see from the screenshot here on the right) >>>

A few of them did actually check my profile after mentioning I was looking for a new role and then replied to me. This triggered a handful of interesting conversations.

Some couldn't help jumping on the opportunity to try to sell me some service, and I also had a few contacts telling me they were also looking for a job, and asking me if I could help them.

Now about 10% of the respondents actually read the entire message and checked my new role, then only contacted me with a stroke of "Good luck!" or some sort of encouragement.

3 of them stood out of the crowd though, actually talking about possible cooperation. That's 3 out of 14,607 contacts or 0.002%

What is there to learn from this?

Apart from the fact that broadcasting your redundancy to your entire network is probably never going to get you your dream job, here are the main learnings from this operation:

• Don't spam your contact list! Yes, it is easy and quick to do so in just a few clicks, as this experiment can prove it. But it won't get you anywhere. Instead, you need to offer your contacts something they want or need, keeping in mind that they will only give you a few seconds of their attention before they move on to the next post.
• Communication should be a conscious act. While artificial intelligence and automation are spreading at an exponential rate, you can't just let a machine control your communication skills, because they are the key to your emotional intelligence. EQ is what will make you useful in an automated world where creative thinking, innovation, empathy, integrity, and self-awareness will be more needed than ever.

More on EQ: https://thriveglobal.com/stories/is-emotional-intelligence-the-key-to-the-future/

• 90% of the contacts responded blindly. Why? Because they have been conditioned to do so. Once again fast and easy action, however meaningless. Social media has largely increased the availability of information and, as a result, made us blinder of what is really happening around us. Interactions over 8 seconds are becoming increasingly rare. The more you automate, the less people actually want to spend time doing things.

The sharp decrease in our attention span: https://www.wyzowl.com/human-attention-span/

• These automation tools are gimmicky and pretty much useless. Why on earth does LinkedIn have this system in the first place? I mean come on! What value does it bring to the platform and to its users? You can actually have a chat with a contact without ever typing anything, just by clicking AI-(de)generated answers! Add to that the automatically generated hashtags for posts which often seem to be completely random. And now we are getting this choice of new "likes" buttons. What about developing some really useful features instead? Or re-activating previous ones as the RSS feeds for posts for example. #JeffWeiner, if you hear me!

WARNING: This article features actions performed either by professionals or under the supervision of professionals. Accordingly, the author and the editor must insist that no one attempt to re-create or re-enact any activity performed on this article.

I would be very interested to hear about your thoughts on automation and artificial intelligence in social media platforms; do you believe having everything pre-written for you is actually a useless feature or that, on the contrary, it brings you substantial benefits. Please do elaborate on your comment.