Musings on Quirks NY: What is the Future of Research & Empathy?

This week, research, insight, and data humans descend upon Manhattan to debate, hustle and peruse the wares of their peers. There will be no shortage of gleaming new tech - proudly flaunted by researchers and consultants. No doubt, much of this will be infused, powered, and super-spiced with AI. The talks will be a chorus of predictions and depictions of our AI-powered fate: how to ride it, tame it, and prep for it. We'll see case studies boasting of the advances players have made with this new darling of every industry. In all of this, I hope we'll also spare a thought for humans.

Not just the humans that we often reference that we all fear may lose out to automation (altho those are extremely important), but also the ones that are being increasingly sorted, packaged, and sold as inventory to the highest bidder. And the humans that work in research. The ones that used to talk to those other (participant) humans. The methodology-makers, the creative thinkers, the strategists, and the ethnographers. I believe that these humans might emerge from this moment of AI bluster as the most valuable assets we have.

So I'm interested in hearing what they have to say, what are their musings on the future of research and empathy? We've been debating these big existential topics for a while and we believe that this conversation is only going to grow in importance, What are we humans really good at? What should we be getting better at; learning more about and how should we fit into a world that will have an awful lot more robots in it?

We've curated some of our last few months of thinking on just this topic for those inclined to take a moment to reflect. Check them out here!