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I think the dangerous part is taking something biological and trying to make a direct association with something as vaguely defined as emotional intelligence. This kind of thing is extremely dependent on culture. If you take an American with high emotional intelligence and plant them in Finland, they aren't necessarily going to be able to read people the same way. It's hard to imagine a case where this kind of thing isn't a learned ability. It's like saying men are better at Algebra. Most people are capable of being perfect at Algebra with the right training and focus. It's just a matter of moving numbers around in a very predictable way. Responding to people's emotional cues is similarly something trainable, but because it's cultural and more difficult to define precisely (and what isn't less precise than math?), it tends to acquire a more mystical aura and lends itself to being defined as something gender specific when that might not really be the case at all. Maybe it really is, but we have no hard evidence either way, and any statistics about it have a high probability of being culturally biased. In the long run, I don't think that training new generations of people to respond to emotions will be any more effective than recording successful interactions and using the data to train computers to do the same thing. With a large enough data set, a good enough algorithm that can vary tone of voice in response to emotional cues is going to be more consistent than a large workforce doing the same thing. With humans, you'll get more exceptional talents, but you'll also get more really awful people, and with the state of the Internet, just one awful customer service experience can go viral and ruin a company's reputation. Even if computers aren't as good as the most exceptional people at responding to emotions, I think the jobs will tend toward the computers there too for the sake of protecting against those few employees who aren't good, don't care, or are just having a bad day and take it out on customers. There will still be high-end services where people care about being served by people, but for commodity customer service, computers will win within a few decades (and this applies to managing employees too, particularly in situations like scheduling, but I think middle management will be slower to switch for cultural reasons, since managers actually have some control over keeping their jobs). |