AI will re-design reality
In their book The Age of AI: And Our Human Future, Henry A. Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher are talking about how AI would redefine our existence since the human race will find itself in a position, where it will not be the only force that will create reality with its ability to reason. Today everybody is trying to give their 50 cents on the “generative AI vibe”, forgetting that we already had two “AI winters” since the 1950s when humanity started serious AI attempts. But again, the general community is missing the main challenges, we should be working on, if we want to utilize AI in a way to build a better world, than the one based on human centricity only. From my perspective main challenges, we should be working on, are:
- Creating meaningful use cases for AI.
- Re-education of people’s reason-creation mechanism in order to acknowledge new (AI) sources of reality creation.
- Re-designing of society and business environment to incorporate AI-based and managed practices in a way that will lead to a better-balanced society.
The biggest obstacles, in improving our abilities to tackle the above-mentioned challenges, are connected with the power of our identification with a human-centric world view and our limited capability to see the world outside our mental frameworks, which usually serve us a strong base for our everyday efficiency, but in this case, they will be our limitation factor for creating a change that is needed in order to build better “AI incorporated” world.
AI and leading people
If we step down from the society level, where AI’s ability to create reality (or we should say the representation of reality, since even today all reality is just its representation, human one, that is) that could be different as human one and, in some cases, not known to humans, will be a serious challenge for world leaders, we can try to imagine how AI will influence people leadership arena.
There is a lot of business communication connected with leadership paradigm change, based on changes in a business environment. Changes like: bigger impact of work-life balance initiatives, remote work becoming a norm, not an exception, new generation’s approach to work, based on different world view, increased speed of changes … Today’s business leaders are trying to adjust their business styles in order to meet these changes with proper leadership styles. With the increase in “health-related” issues we are facing, the question is, are we reaching the limits of the leadership capacities of humans. If the requirements regarding leadership are growing based on theories, that leadership must serve as an “amortization” level for all these changes, so that business will run smoothly, no matter what the market will throw at it, the question for any individual is: Do I want to be a leader? Why would I take on this task? Why should I take responsibility for “people management”? Is there a different path for me? “Influencer”?
AI and business
If AI will “dis-connect” the success of the business from “we need more people”, the situation, where owners and leaders should actively look for ways how to solve the “people problem”, will change. All major societal changes happened when the “production mechanism” changed. During those times, elites changed also. The ones who understood the change before others and were able to capitalize on improved efficiency of “new production mechanism”, rise on top.
I think we all agree that AI will re-design our world (once people will stop playing with it and when “the critical mass” of individuals will create enough use cases for AI, that will lead to substantial business outcomes, which will create a new business reality). AI development will eventually move in the self-learning direction, due to the limitation of our human capabilities in this area. Face it, with computing power growth and differentiation (once quantum computing will reach its maturity), we will become an inferior part of this domain. But if we can use those capabilities of machines to our advantage, we will be ok. People’s purpose development still has enormous potential.
How to get ready for AI re-design of business
Being a business owner or a leader, the focus will move from thinking about how to manage resources better (yes also people), to how to set up proper business goals for AI technology and how to make sure that AI optimization protocols are better than that of competition. Starting today, owners have a dilemma: how to prioritize investments. If they will focus too much on ensuring that our leaders develop skills to better manage the current environment (and the people challenges we mentioned in the beginning), we can miss a shift to new business models based on automation, AI practices, and decreasing people influence. Understanding technology’s impact on business and the potential that technology offers in optimizing or re-designing business practices, is a must for modern leadership. But will this kind of management have enough patience to work with people, until the change will come? The owners, that will be able to find leaders, who are capable of balancing out this change, will be the new elite. The governments, that will be able to find the proper balance, that will support this technologically backed development by creating a new reality for the masses that will not be based on their role as resources for social development, will run the most successful countries. If the majority of government will not be successful in managing this transformation, we will be facing growing division in society and the tensions can only increase until the breaking point. And from history, we know what a breaking point looks like.
