Are you sick of AI yet? Or has AI revolutionized your workflow? Are you working fewer hours while doubling productivity by harnessing the power of AI? Have AI tools elevated the quality of your work to the highest level of excellence?
Or do you just need a little time to master prompting the AI, then all your career dreams will come true?
Or did AI kill your career?
The above may be true for some industries. But for most of us, AI is not the revolution we are being sold. We are constantly hearing about how the people who will be the most successful in the near future will be those who master the AI prompts and systems.
Nah.
The people who will be most successful will be those able to function without AI. AI is just the evolution of technology we already have. We’ve done this before. In the eighties, you could say: “success will come to those who master the PERSONAL COMPUTER!” Now, everybody has a computer. In the nineties, you could say: “To be successful, you must master SEARCH ENGINES!” Now, everybody googles. And so it will be with AI. Same thing, just more integrated, automated, convenient, invasive, and monetizable.
“But AI can build me a website in minutes that used to take months of development and thousands of dollars!”
Cool. So, everybody can have a website. In 1965 to share a video you had to have a dedicated motion picture camera and a reel of film, get the lighting and focus right, shoot the footage, develop the film in chemical baths, dry it, physically cut and assemble the film to edit, run through a Telecine machine to convert to a video format on massive reel to reel tape, then transmit that video through radio frequencies to antennae on homes within range of your transmission and hope that you had an audience there to receive it. Now, my 12yo can pull a supercomputer out of their pocket, shoot a 4K video and instantly post it to a worldwide audience.
So, it comes back to us humans and how we choose to use, or not use, these tech tools. And the people who rise to the top will not be those cultivating artificial intelligence. It will be folks relying on their own taste, wits, experience, perspective and will; those who cultivate actual intelligence.
But…. what is that? It seems we still have a rudimentary understanding of what actually constitutes human intelligence. The study of intelligence is a relatively new endeavour. IQ tests were first developed barely a century ago. Only recently as 1983, Howard Gardner developed the theory of multiple intelligences, ranging from kinesthetic to existential. If we observe a person who is adept at math, well-read, eloquent we could easily say “they are intelligent”. But AI systems already crunch numbers and text and regurgitate it back with perfect grammar. So, what is the intelligence that technocrats are scrambling to emulate with AI?
What’s the Point…. Of View?
I believe that true human intelligence lies in the ability to create. Some religions posit that God made man in his image; it’s not that we all look like gods, it’s that we have the ability to create. The Creator created creators. But there is a specific type of creation that is unique to humans: storytelling.
AI creates data reports. Beavers create dams. Bees create hives. Plants create blossoms. As far as I can tell, humans are the only species that create story. We observe the world and create meanings and connections and purpose outside of pure survival. We paint pictures that tell the story of a moment. We write songs that involve us in the story of love. We play sports to participate in a story of victory and defeat. We take guidance from stories within religious texts. We construct a narrative of governance to make our societies cohesive.
To tell a story requires a point of view. There must be an entity that holds knowledge that is unquantifiable, illogical, emotional, spiritual. There needs to be experience. Perhaps, a soul?
Is this what developers are aiming to achieve with Artificial General Intelligence? Because for all the advancements being touted in AI, we ain’t even close yet. But already, clients and creators are looking at today’s infantile AI to guide them.
If creating a story is the most human thing you could do, as we farm out our creativity to AI we are literally farming out our humanity. This is not exclusively the fault of AI. The past two decades have brought a massive tsunami of “content” crashing down on us. Broadcasting, internet, streaming, and of course, social media have quickly evolved into a quantity over quality game, leaving our attention spans shattered and scattered. We are in a constant state of consumption. The “old” way of entertaining ourselves is much more naturally human. The capacity to watch a movie or read a book is an act of storytelling, as you are creating your own relationship to that material. You understand your own story through the characters in the novel you read. The film you watch gives you perspective on your own relationships. When you dive deep into story you marinate in humanity and come away learning something about yourself or the world. These days, I have trouble sitting still to watch a 2hr movie. How many of us have abandoned long-form storytelling for sixty minutes of scrolling through 15s video clips? This deterioration of our ability to slow down, think deeply, reflect, empathize, has ushered in an age of mediocrity, where five songs that all sound the same are accepted as pop hits, Starbucks is considered premium coffee, and Tik Tok influencers are praised as thought leaders. Where mediocrity is embraced, AI will thrive.
Because… it’s fine. I use AI. For editing photos, there are useful AI tools built into the Adobe software. We used to rely on stock image accounts for certain content and presentations, now we generate with AI. We get an AI summary of our meetings, yay. But all the work AI is doing is just OK. For coding, or similar fields, I’m sure it’s revolutionary. But in my world, AI is the mediocre employee who gets the job done but must have their hand held the whole time and never really produces the exact results you want. AI-generated writing feels hollow and is burdened by false information and strange context. Even with tremendous specificity in prompts, AI-generated images fall short. AI research is riddled with inaccuracies and sometimes conflicting data. And audiences know. In our experience, and amongst friends we’ve talked to, AI content garners much less engagement from desired consumers.
AI will get better at being AI. But how much? And the big question here is… why? Ten years ago, were you taking long walks alone on the beach, dwelling on how much better life would be with an AI to respond to your email or take notes at a meeting? Today, do you look into the future and imagine how happy and fulfilled you will be once you have an AI agent to assist you with all your daily tasks?
I think of my car, which is equipped with autonomous driving capability. Never in my history of wanting a jet pack or an invisibility cloak or whatever fun futuristic tech did I care about having an autonomous car. Now that I have it, I care even less. It’s a cool idea, but for all the research, development, money spent, and people dead from when it’s gone wrong, it’s completely unnecessary. Also, does not work as well as promised. As it is with AI. Who has been asking for this? Who has been marching in the streets, lobbying Congress, writing songs, forming support groups to advocate for the progress of AI?
When you start looking for answers to these questions, you realize, ‘Oh…’ AI isn’t for us. Right now, there is a firestorm of investment in AI. Billions from federal governments. Hundreds of billions from private sector. Trillions worldwide over the next several years will be spent on building out AI infrastructure. The buy-in to the future of AI is unprecedented. Investors will be looking for massive returns.
So, whether we needed AI or not, it is here and will continue becoming entwined in our lives in the same way the internet and smartphones have. You will figure out how to use it. It will be helpful sometimes and annoying others. But if you want to reach for greatness in your career, your entrepreneurial endeavours, your personal life, you will need actual intelligence to get you there.
Again, I think about my autonomous car. For the car to take control, I have to give up my autonomy. I become a passenger, at the whim of the AI responding to traffic, picking the route, avoiding hazards. I am at the mercy of its mistakes. And I’m still confined to a car. Autonomy is not the freedom to do whatever you want; it’s the freedom to control the processes that govern your life. Everybody will be using the same AI to get from point A to point B, all stuck in the same traffic. It’s those of us who take the wheel who will find the new and exciting route to get where we want to go.
