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AI makes emotional intelligence matter
The models read through open source material and clandestinely acquired information. That frees analysts to do what only the best of them can do for a president: offer a judgment on the second and third order consequences of a choice.
That judgment rests on emotional intelligence, the ability to understand a complicated, ruthless character like Vladimir Putin. As artificial intelligence increases the depth of intelligence more broadly, emotional intelligence becomes increasingly important in public service.
Analysts need an understanding of what drives and motivates complicated players like Putin or Xi Jinping. They also need the ability to sift through huge amounts of information and help always-harried policymakers see what matters most in making sensible choices.
How do language models help intelligence analysts?
A large language model can summarize long documents, translate foreign text, and search large collections of reports for relevant passages. That suits open-source intelligence, the analysis of public material such as news, social media, and published records. The volume of that material is far beyond what a team of people can read. These models can state wrong information with confidence, so their outputs still have to be checked against sources.
Why do second-order effects trip up decision-makers?
Sociologist Robert K. Merton wrote about this in his 1936 essay The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action. He argued that actions taken for one purpose produce effects nobody intended, including ones that defeat the original aim. Ignorance, error, and the pressure of immediate goals all hide those effects. His essay is one of the foundations of the study of unintended consequences.
How did emotional intelligence become a concept?
Psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer introduced the term emotional intelligence in a 1990 paper. They defined it as the ability to perceive, understand, and manage emotions in oneself and others. Journalist Daniel Goleman popularized the idea in his 1995 book Emotional Intelligence. Researchers still debate how best to measure it.
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