The moral compass
So here we are in 2024, where Artificial Intelligence intrudes into every aspect of our lives. Most of the use cases I mentioned in Shift Left back in 2018 on the progression of technology are manifesting in front of our eyes. For me, AI has been beneficial thus far. I was keen to hire someone to work on my social media content and edits for a salary as it consumed considerable time. But then I found some effective AI tools to work for me in minutes instead of hours at one-tenth of the cost.
(PS: This post is written by me in person.)
As I write this post, the week’s trending news is about a listed Indian company, Paytm, that terminated one thousand employees. Their official statement to the press says AI can now do the work the terminated employees managed. Google has plans to lay off another thirty thousand employees as their AI models can automate advertising sales. This is in addition to twelve thousand employees laid off by the same company last year.
Most of Big Tech laid off employees in hordes in 2023. However, the reason was not cited as AI last year, as it has been categorically specified this time.
It’s not that people are losing their jobs, and there aren’t any new jobs in the market. However, the new jobs need you to constantly upgrade, learn, unlearn, and, importantly, shrug off biases akin to changing clothes.
The transformation requires skills that employees did not have, probably at an age where learning is cumbersome. These are also times when people struggle to draw lines between work and personal chores and seek work-life balance. Where is the time to upskill, even if there is intent?
Then I looked into some new-age jobs people can pursue if they are laid off or can even create an alternate career. I looked into some online influencers. I found many who attempt to educate people with half-baked or, at times, even incorrect information.
What I found distressing was that influencing others rode on generating engagement or pleasing the algorithms coded by the engineers of social media platforms. An influencer’s definition is far from that of a coach who takes it upon them to transform individuals.
Influencers cling to one hook statement, punch line, or an aspect of a subject. They garnish it with graphics, music, and an element that taps into your bias for attention – like money, lifestyle, fame, sex, lust, food. They have the perfect recipe to thrive on the platform.
I learned that influencers only influence social media algorithms and are least concerned about the well-being, motivation, transformation, or whatever they sell to those who follow them. It is opposite to the breed of researchers, educators, academicians, industry veterans, or authors who will take time to change their mentees’ perceptions, skills, or dispositions.
Transformation happens with time, but we do not let that sink in by bargaining for entertainment and engagement. Many people buy into thirty-second narratives of success and achievement from those who never talk about failures—not realizing the work, ingenuity, and patience required to metamorphose into what they desire.
It creates a dangerous expedition for those looking to create an alternate career. I have seen many giving up their jobs to become influencers, only to realize later it was a whimsical world of beating algorithms. I am unsure if I want to trade my experience and learning for entertainment and engagement to communicate my message as a coach or business consultant.
The up-and-coming influencers rocking the social media world
I encountered some interesting social media personalities as I walked through this minefield in my head. I read about one Aitana Lopez from Barcelona, Spain. Aitana is a beautiful influencer with an insane number of followers on social media. She supposedly makes 11000 USD a month. The average monthly salary in the US is around 4500 USD.
If you scroll through her profile, it says she is a gamer and fitness lover. She is beautiful. Then I read that Aitana is an AI-generated influencer, not a human that exists in flesh and blood but in code.
Aitana isn’t the only one; there is Miquela from Los Angeles, US, with 2.5 million followers and a hashtag of Black Lives Matter on her profile. There are many more, such as Aitana and Miquela.
Now, my ethical dilemmas and morals didn’t matter either. The laws of competing and fair play do not concern AI models. These beautiful-looking codes can have the best of both worlds. They can engage, entertain, and spit knowledge from a repository like no other human. Hence, I upgraded my moral compass by learning to ‘build’ an AI influencer that is prettier and more learned than ‘become’ one.
The future of work
I present one use case amidst an ocean of work that technology in its varied avatars can perform. We discussed AI as chatbots, customer service reps, or lifting cargo and heavy material a few months ago.
Today, AI-predicted stocks are performing better than those given by stock market experts, financial analysts, or fund managers. Robotic threads can remove blood clots from the brain. There is a video where an individual has assigned a bot to take over all his tasks on the computer.
Creating these bots through Large Language Models (LLMs) is much simpler than learning code. You can visit OpenAI’s site to view and be amazed by the assistants and content you can create with their recent versions on ChatGPT.
The past primarily thrived on software, programming, and building applications that only an elite class of individuals at cash-rich organizations could execute. Today, you can do the same with plain words, some imagination, and decent hardware in your system.
This is also why organizations like Nvidia and OpenAI are hot on the circuit and stock exchanges compared to the BigTech companies. We are still determining if the future will need words or even humans to create anything. That is when we reach Singularity.
It is, therefore, plausible, if not possible, that my dilemma as a content creator would be the concern for many, irrespective of the nature of their work. There might be slight alterations to the problem statement of finding alternate work, but it will be similar.
Smart humans, smarter machines
Often, when I warm up to the conversations of being displaced by machines, I hear rebuttals of various human prowess. Being human means we have a conscience and a soul. We are also conscious beings with a complex brain. These attributes helped us survive and thrive and justified our supremacy over other animal species. People present two human traits they feel are unmatched: Intelligence and Conscience.
We have lost the battle against intelligence that we have held so proudly since time immemorial. No human comes or can come even a fraction closer to the intelligence a machine provides. (The capabilities of Neuralink chips by Elon Musk might create those possibilities, but we still have to wait and watch.)
We collectively feed intelligence into machines but cannot store or mine it like ChatGPTs or other trained bots.
The grey matter (responsible for intelligence) in the human brain has only tripled in the millions of years of evolution, while the number of transistors on a microchip (responsible for processing and storing information in computers/machines) doubles every two years, leading to an exponential rise in computing power.
Cases of a computer beating a Chess Grandmaster emphatically or automated cars not reporting accidents are known to us. The self-driven cars collided occasionally, but only due to human errors. Such cases indicate the superiority of machines over humans when we speak of intelligence and consciousness.
Hang on, but we have a Soul and Conscience, unlike machines.
Let us talk about conscience and soul (without getting too philosophical). We often believe our conscience sits in the heart of our soul. Hence, machines cannot have a conscience and will not overpower humans.
Author and historian Yuval Noah Harari nevertheless states that we must pray for machines to develop a conscience to operate on some rules of morality rather than purely following a code. Imagine an authoritarian state controlled by an AI system that outcasts the old, disabled, and poor for being fragile and a burden to society.
Even if conscience is missing in systems, what good does it do for them? The machines operate on lines of code and are required to perform a set of instructions. The tasks the machines perform are faster, more accurate, and even attract greater attention, as stated in the examples above, creating a greater demand for intelligence over conscience and soul.
We have balanced our intelligence with conscience until now. The rationality of our decision-making revolved around intelligence and factored in conscience. This is why we pride ourselves on being human.
But aren’t we moving into an era where both attributes take separate courses? For now, superior intelligence is proving way better and sufficient even without conscience.
“To discover truth, it is necessary to work within the metaphors of our own time, which are for the most part technological. Today artificial intelligence and information technologies have absorbed many of the questions that were once taken up by theologians and philosophers: the mind’s relationship to the body, the question of free will, the possibility of immortality. These are old problems, and although they now appear in different guises and go by different names, they persist in conversations about digital technologies much like those dead metaphors that still lurk in the syntax of contemporary speech.
God, Human, Animal, Machine – Meghan O’Gieblyn
All the eternal questions have become engineering problems.”
What skills should we develop to meet the future?
I am not suggesting that we turn into machines and uproot our conscience in the quest for intelligence. On the contrary, we must beware of falling into the trap of turning into underperforming machines or fake influencers. But dwelling only on our conscience could also be detrimental to us.
I have been thinking about what is required in humans beyond intelligence and conscience to survive and thrive in the times to come. Complexities on how we lead our lives or will live amid rapid technological, geopolitical, economic, and climate change demand something more.
This is where I see Resilience as a valuable skill to harness into our souls.
Resilience isn’t the art of feeling good at all times and slapping affirmations now and then. Similar to what most influencers on social media do to shape our choices. It isn’t about seeing the world as a magical orb. Resilience is about getting comfortable with the uncomfortable. To truly understand the factors we can control and what is beyond our domain.
The AI-generated influencers, bots, and systems may pose a risk to our work and alter our understanding of our world. We might be unable to control their ascendance and infiltration into our lives.
We can, however, control how human intelligence can imbibe AI to make lives purposeful. A few steps that can be followed to build on Resilience are:
- Building Resilience is understanding and articulating the challenges of our organizations, ecosystems, and environment and creating solutions. Shift focus from the self to a larger goal or entity.
- Also, individuals who have been a bit pessimistic and cautious have generally been more successful than the ones who have been unreasonably optimistic about events and the future. Optimism about yourself is great when you are pessimistic about a situation. It shapes your thoughts into problem-solving rather than complaining about it.
- Resilience also needs adaptability. Those who are resilient but also resistant will often perish early against those who are resilient and flexible. Arguing technology will not displace human skills is being resistant. Flexibility will train you to understand platforms and build scenarios that can benefit you most.
Conclusion
My point in this post is not to highlight some trends or make predictions. However, the idea is to focus on those skills that might be useful when the projections and forecasts fail. Most often, the things that never happen always happen—Imbibe Resilience in your soul to meet the shift. That might be the need in a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) world that awaits us.
About the writer
Roshan Shetty is an author, corporate coach, and consultant. He trains corporates on Leadership, Emotional Intelligence, Change Management, and Wellness.
His book Shift Left on Emotional Intelligence and skills required for the future is available on Amazon worldwide.
Learn more about his work at www.roshanshetty.com. Subscribe to his YouTube Channel, Roshan Shetty, for life hacks on well-being.
I totally agree that there has never been resilience more important than the current times we are living in. I also believe that upskilling too is important to consistently thrive in today’s world.