Humanity: Risk vs. Reward

One of my favorite people in real estate, Heather Harmon of GeekEstate, gave an amazing speech at MLS Reset last week. It was titled “Being Human in the Age of AI” and she did a great job at delivering her main point. Boiled down, it was a declaration that in the Age of AI, human connections reign supreme. At dinner the night before, we had a conversation about that when she said it was about a heart-to-heart connection that robots/AI simply could not duplicate.

Of course I agree with her.

But it came on the heels of a conversation I had with a good friend of mine from college who is a writer, and whose son is a musician. We had talked about art and AI, and how AI-slop was just infesting the arts. He thought very little of it, because AI-generated writing is terrible, AI music is garbage, and AI videos are bad. His view was that AI might be great at some things, but it could never do art that reaches the human soul.

Again, as a writer, I agreed with him wholeheartedly. I use AI everyday (I used it to create the image at the top of this dispatch for example) but I do not use it to write. Because I want to believe that there is something important in the way I write, as a human being, that connects with my readers who are also human beings. God, I hope that’s true.

Having said that… there are angles here that people don’t talk about too much. Put into a single phrase, it is this:

There are risks and rewards to humanity.

Most of our conversations around AI futurism (“They’re going to take all our jobs!” vs. “AI will never replace human connection!”) fail to recognize this extraordinarily important dimension.

I thought we might discuss it openly. This will be a public post as I think the concepts herein are worth discussing widely.

Humanity: The Reward

Much of Heather’s talk spoke about deeply human things—things I believe in wholeheartedly—like emotions, empathy, connection. Obviously, the topic is of supreme importance in real estate, that is almost entirely dependent on relationships and connections.

And she is correct that most of the good things in life involve other people: family, friends, acquaintances, even rivals and enemies. Ask Conan the Barbarian what is good in life—the answer involves people.

Even in commerce, who can deny that a meal is actually improved somehow by having an expert waiter who just knows how to connect with you, who makes a good time into a great time, who somehow makes the food taste just a little bit better. We’ve all met people like that who provide such a fantastic service that it brightens our day just a little bit.

No AI can replace that.

The same can be said for my writer friend (and me to some extent). I simply do not believe that AI can ever create Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. I don’t believe that AI can write Shakespeare or deliver the ineffable and impossible to explain beauty of Alison Krauss singing. Because I believe that art is fundamentally about one human soul somehow connecting to other human souls, I do not believe that AI can do art. Not until AI has a soul, and if it does… is it truly AI then instead of yet another one of God’s creatures?

There is great reward to human beings, at least for us human beings.

Humanity: The Risk

The trouble is… there is a lot of risk to human beings as well. Humans are not just empathetic, emotionally connected, brilliant, and shining with an inner light. They are also selfish and cruel and lazy and stupid. We are neither angels nor devils, but a combination of both.

I found these two famous examples of the risk of dealing with human beings:

That song went viral with 30 million views on YouTube as of this writing. The full story can be found on Dave Carroll’s website.

Then there is this call with a Comcast customer service rep that went mega-viral as well:

That sound recording also went mega-viral. From Claude, my research assistant:

Block posted the recording on SoundCloud. It hit 5 million listens within days and generated over 1,000 news articles. Comcast’s SVP of customer experience personally called Block to apologize, and the company released a statement saying they were “very embarrassed.”

The interesting aftermath: Block publicly asked Comcast not to fire the rep. He wrote to NPR saying the problem was systemic, not one bad employee. He pointed out that retention departments provide financial incentives to reps who prevent cancellations, which essentially pits the rep against the customer. Former Comcast employees came out of the woodwork online confirming that’s exactly how their call centers operated.

Comcast was already widely disliked — they were named the most hated company in America in 2017 — and this call became a kind of symbol of everything wrong with cable company customer service.

Every single one of us has at least one, and probably many, customer service nightmare stories. Anyone of us who has ever been to the DMV can relate to the idea that there is a lot of risk in dealing with human beings.

Now, listen to this (well, actually, watch it):

As a frequent traveler, I have had to call airline customer service numerous times. A few were delightful, with a great agent on the line who really helped me and also made me feel better about things. Most were… not.

AI Might Never Do Art, But It Can Do Entertainment

As for my friend and I who truly believe that art is reserved for humans alone, I think we’re right.

But most of what is in the “arts” industry is not art; it is mere entertainment. Sure, once in a while a great creator with a vision pulls together a team and manages to make entertainment that is art. Mozart and Beethoven, after all, were writing music to be successful in front of large audiences. They didn’t know they were writing CLASSICAL MUSIC! (swirl wine around the glass); they were just writing music.

There is no amount of rhetoric that could convince me that Starfleet Academy is art. Or any of the Marvel superhero movies. You will have great difficulty convincing me that any work of Bad Bunny, Lil Wayne, and Sexyy Red is art. Public Enemy and A Tribe Called Quest? I’m willing to listen to arguments, but then again, I’m Gen-X through and through.

And AI can create this:

I prefer this song to anything in the Billboard Top 100 singles of 2025; I know because I downloaded this song to my iTunes, but have not touched anything from Billboard.

This is not art, but it’s damn good entertainment. I won’t get the reward of transcendence where I can feel the musician’s soul through the music, but I don’t have to deal with the risk of something horrible from some record company “artist.”

How People Balance Risk vs. Reward

That’s the point of AI, in a way. When would you risk the downside of dealing with a human being?

After all, when it’s bad, it’s really bad. Look at the examples above.

When it’s good, it’s really good.

Question is, when do you risk it? What are the circumstances under which you are willing to take the chance of a horrible experience, in order to have the chance of a wonderful one?

As a general rule, anything required means not taking the risk. I can’t imagine ever wanting to interact with human government employees if I can avoid it. Listen again to the Elevenlabs video and ask yourself why you wouldn’t want that to be who you talk to when you have to go to the DMV, deal with a tax issue, or file a permit. Why would you ever want to talk to a human if it is someone you must talk to?

Sure, a well-trained and empathetic customer service rep could make your day a bit brighter while he or she deals with your problem. But chances are that you are far more likely to have a horrible experience than a good one, especially as the company you are dealing with gets larger and larger. Your local dry cleaner? Could be wonderful more often than not. Your internet provider? I don’t think so.

That extends in our industry to people like the compliance officer at the MLS, or the person at the escrow office. If you must interact with someone, then you want the risk to be as low as possible.

If the interaction is optional, then the answer depends on the nature of what you’re after. A waiter is the classic example; most of us would prefer a human waiter because if we get the right person, our experience is improved. Fast food workers, on the other hand, do not get that same risk-reward balance.

Doctors, lawyers, and other professionals—I believe most of us would prefer a human, because when we go to one of them, we have a deep need that is not merely mechanical but emotional. Illness or injury isn’t simply about fixing the problem; it’s about having human care. A will or a contract might be better drafted by an AI, but there are important emotional and human elements to law such that we will all prefer a human lawyer using AI.

Real estate, I believe and have always believed, falls into this bucket. Buying or selling a home is highly emotional because it is enormously expensive and intensely personal. What you might love about a home may be precisely what I detest about it. I do not at this time foresee a world where human advisors (doesn’t matter what we call them) do not play a role in a real estate transaction.

I say this after reflection and experience, despite what I wrote earlier. Heather Harmon might have changed my mind on that.

The Simple Key: Authenticity

Nonetheless, you should not read this essay as some kind of a paean to the real estate agent, or some blanket statement that a robot can never replace you. Instead, you should read it as both a warning and an assurance.

The warning is that if you are not yourself fully human and treating your customers and clients as fully human, then you can and will be replaced. Bad customer service agents have no future in the AI Age. Agents who treat their clients as walking wallets have little future in the AI Age.

The assurance is that if you are, if you focus on your own humanity despite flaws and warts and all, and are able to maximize that connection with other humans, you cannot be replaced. Do note that because we humans come in all different flavors and personalities and beliefs, there are humans with whom you are not meant to connect and never will. Let them go; there will be others with whom you do, no matter how weird you are. I am walking proof of that.

Then consider the interactions where the client needs a human connection, and those where the client doesn’t need it. Discussing whether a home fits the buyer’s lifestyle and family? Human. Sending over documents to sign? No human necessary. And the risk/reward ratio changes for the client depending on what the nature of the task is.

In our industry specifically, there is too much of an emphasis on being semi-human in the name of “professionalism.” What I mean by “semi-human” is that so many brokers and agents are taught to be fake in the name of being professional. They are taught to hide who they really are, to appeal to everybody (because a client could come from anywhere), to fake competence they don’t actually have, to pretend to care when they don’t because they survive on commissions. Agents are taught to carefully curate their social media presence in case a post might offend someone. So many agents walk around like politicians who have to appeal to the broadest possible voter base, instead of being themselves.

In the AI Age, I think this is a mistake. Humans can tell when they’re speaking to a real person or to AI, and that extends to speaking to a real person vs. speaking to a carefully curated representative of that person. We can all smell and feel inauthenticity.

All I can tell you now is that AI does inauthenticity better than any human. If you are looking to present a certain image of yourself that isn’t closely tied to who you really are, believe me AI can do that better than you.

So it turns out that all of the risk-reward balance comes down to a single all-important question: is authenticity required for this?

Administrative tasks, government paperwork, MLS compliance—none of that requires authenticity. Counseling someone does. Understanding another person’s needs does.

I have no doubt in my mind that real estate will be one of the industries that will be an early adopter of AI. I have no doubt that AI Assistant bots will have a dramatic impact. My concern today (though it isn’t really a concern) is that too many agents will use AI to expand their already inauthentic selves to even more people hoping that sheer quantity of marketing and messaging will pay off.

It is not a real concern because in the long run, AI will do inauthenticity better than they can… so they will be replaced either by full-blown AI real estate agents or by authentic agents using AI bots to give themselves more time and opportunity to be real for the clients they do actually connect with on a human level.

In the Age of AI…

My personal experience with AI over the last couple of weeks has altered my understanding both of it and of myself.

Turns out, my AI is far smarter than I am. It reasons faster, it reasons better in some cases, it forgets nothing, and its knowledge is the sum total of all human knowledge. It can do things I could never imagine doing.

The only advantages I have over the AI are creativity and authenticity. That’s it. (At least for now… who knows if someone will release actual AGI and create a new lifeform?)

I suspect the only advantages that you have over AI are the same: creativity and authenticity. Maximize both, and use AI to fill in everything else.

Your thoughts are particularly welcome.

-rsh

PS: This music video is of a song that hit #1 on Billboard’s country digital songs chart after hitting 3 million streams on Spotify in under a month. It is entirely AI generated by an unknown creator.