I am less worried about artificial intelligence than the authentic stupidity many organisations adopting it increasingly exhibit. On the upside, though, it offers real opportunities for those willing to embrace their identity.
Organisations committed to scale adopted pre-AI systems in pursuit of efficiency, from Lean Six Sigma to Agile, and sanitised creativity and originality to the extent that those companies increasingly resemble each other. Data has become a religion that cannot be questioned, and the fear of the liabilities attached to differentiation is a real constraint. Branding becomes an expensive exercise in making mediocrity, from leadership and management to product offerings, attractive and acceptable to shareholders and clients alike.
There is a morbid fascination to be had in observing these organisations exhibiting something like an “Instagram Filter Effect” as they aim to appear flawlessly curated, suppressing their true personalities, emotions, and imperfections to fit a commercially acceptable, hyper-polished aesthetic as they pursue unsustainable business models designed for a previous age.
And now, there is a stampede to use AI to automate the process. Priceless.
I don’t care about these organisations, but I do care, deeply, for those whose lives they are vandalising through their stupidity, and who are expected to passively go along with it, like latter day third-class passengers on the Titanic, for whom it was not economically viable to provide lifeboats.
Because, of course, the Titanic was unsinkable.
For around a Century, organisations created the possibility of careers for those who did not have the good sense to be born into wealth. As first the industrial, then the internet, and automation revolutions followed each other in rapid succession, the professions created a wonderful opportunity to monetise complication.
Clever people created complicated things, from machines to laws, that then required other clever people to translate them for less clever people, to ensure a good, often very good, living for those who did not actually make anything. Now we have the intelligence revolution, and our need for clever people to uncomplicate things is being dramatically reduced, because even cleverer people have created machines to do it instead. The idea of a career, particularly in the professions, looks increasingly shaky.
AI wisdom has it that technology will replace people in many other occupations, from teachers to surgeons. I’m not so sure. Yes, technology will probably replace people whose jobs have been reduced to following processes in search of efficiency and productivity, but not those tricky, unmeasurable, unique qualities that make people human. The challenge will be that this seems unlikely to become clear before technologies do enormous amounts of damage - or, more precisely, those people designing and running them - that will take time to recover.
For those of us of an artisanal persuasion, for whom the lustre of careers tarnished early in favour of doing work that mattered to us, it is a real opportunity to get our retaliation in first. As we travel further into a time when we can access, mostly for nothing, or next to nothing, the knowledge of how to do something, or even the means to do it, everything from Plumbing to the Law is in danger of becoming a commodity - except, of course, for the parts technology cannot reach.
Our deepest human need is to be truly seen and heard for who we are, not the part we play, and it will be a long time I suspect before technology can give us a hug that connects us to someone else.
I think it is reminiscent of the Chinese folk tale of a Duke and a Wheelwright:
A Chinese Wheelwright was making a wheel at the lower end of a great chamber while his duke, Duke Huan of Ch’i, was reading a book at the upper end. Putting aside his mallet and chisel, the wheelwright called out to the duke and asked him what he was reading. “A book that records the words of the sages,” the duke answered. “Are those sages alive?” the wheelwright asked. “They are dead,” the duke replied. “In that case, what you are reading can be nothing but the lees and scum of bygone men.”
The duke was outraged. How dare the wheelwright dismiss such a book and such sages? “If you can explain your statement, I shall let it pass. If you cannot, you shall die!” the duke thundered. “Speaking as a wheelwright,” the craftsman began, “I look at the matter this way: When I am making a wheel, if my stroke is too slow, then it bites deep but is not steady; if my stroke is too fast, then it is steady, but does not go deep. The right pace, neither slow nor fast, cannot get into the hand unless it comes from the heart. It is a thing that cannot be put into words.”
Taken from Brooks, David. The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life (pp. 100-101).
As careers become commodities, playable by any actor who can access the lines she needs from her phone, I believe it is the Wheelwright in us that will be in demand.
I don’t know how much of the cause and rectification of the extended outage of Barclays Bank’s systems were identified and fixed by automated systems, but we can be fairly sure that those clients who didn’t get paid, or pay their tax on time, were not assuaged by technology.
Promises are very human things, as are relationships and reputations, and when technology screws up, nobody blames the technology (except, perhaps, the person who authorised it)
Perhaps what we are seeing with populism is an early indicator of a greater disconnection. Inarticulate anger harnessed by those long on power, but light on vision and principles, providing a lightning rod for the disconnected.
Messages may scale, but relationships do not. The Orange One embodies a message, but very few people would claim to have a relationship with him, rather than with the idea he has harnessed, so, in many respects, The Donald is a technology more than an individual, and his following as fragile as Barclay’s relationships with its customers.
Mentoring does not scale, either. We may purchase books by self appointed business gurus, but they do not know us, and their abstracted advice is rarely applicable at an individual level in the context of the challenges we face. Mentoring is a relationship and conversation, measured in terms of a sense of being seen and heard that data cannot capture.
We are accelerating into a time of agentic AI systems designed to operate with a degree of autonomy, making decisions and taking actions to achieve specific goals. They can perceive their environment, plan strategies, and execute tasks. They are goal-oriented, logical, and, increasingly, can reason, learn and adapt. Therein, I suspect, lies their most significant vulnerability.
Agentic AI will use its qualities to follow its goals without the sensing qualities we humans have. We will get pretty precisely what we ask for, with no moderating influences, and the inevitable flaws that would otherwise be corrected will be on full display. I find that a sobering thought.
I wonder whether we need to consider leadership and mentoring for agentic systems. To a degree, we get away with poor leadership and management of people because even demotivated people are still people and react as such. Agentic systems have no such redeeming qualities. Maybe, in time, they will develop a proxy for them, but not yet, given the rate at which the seductive siren call of short-term profits is calling business leaders.
I also wonder whether vocations may see a resurgence. Having been effectively submerged by the “measure-everything-in-money” movement of the last few decades, AI provides those with the inclination vastly superior tools to exercise their enthusiasm for their subject. Combining the abilities of AI with the power of vocation is an exciting prospect, as the dead hand of risk-averse and disinterested “bullshit jobs” management is lifted in areas where creativity has a powerful effect - such as education.
I often see people who remind me of Matryoshka nesting dolls, with their fundamental capabilities and enthusiasms submerged beneath layer after layer of formulaic education and organisational cultural constraints, and I find myself quietly excited by the idea of connecting those enthusiasms to the power of AI in all its forms, so that, instead of automating corporate mediocrity, we might encourage the blossoming of crafts for the modern age.
If we are a time of creative destruction of obsolete organisational forms, let’s use it to create something we are proud of……
Reminder.
There will be an Outside the Walls / New Artisans open Zoom Call on Wednesday, 12th February at 5:00 pm UK. The link is below, and I’ll send reminders beforehand. I hope to see you there…