Re-thinking How We Use AI!
Massive layoffs are not the smartest way to create space for artificial intelligence in our companies!
"Software Engineer Lost His $150k-a-year job to AI!"
These are among the latest headlines from tech newsletters that have been filling our mailboxes since AI models like ChatGPT became mainstream.
And it's a sad reality, and there's absolutely nothing anyone can do about it.
Nothing.
AI has come to stay!
We may complain, resist, and try to fight back, but as we complain and fight back, AI keeps finding its way deeper and deeper into the delicate fabrics of society—from writing codes for engineers and even pushing many away—think about Microsoft laying off almost 6,000 people (3% of its global workforce) from its workforce and even laying off its Director of AI for Startups all in the name of making more room for AI; to AI doing the jobs of fresh graduates and making it hard for them to get jobs thereby gradually creating a future disaster we may not see now!
We haven't even talked about AI's massive negative effect on the climate—in the future, AI will be the biggest consumer of electricity and water, with its gigantic data centres that would be as big as small towns.
It may be ‘helping’ in somehow, but the cost is high—really high—and we are not feeling it yet.
Forget all the tiny reports you're seeing all around now.
We haven't seen anything yet.
I moderately use AI to do research, organise content, source for ideas, and edit, but recently, when I began to explore other areas of AI (deeply), I could literally feel my heart thump louder.
I was amazed, and I knew immediately that we had a problem on our hands.
If we don't learn how to adapt, adjust, and, if possible, evolve, we're going to have a young generation that will lose a lot of hands-on experience to AI, all in the name of innovation.
Our parents didn't have to struggle with AI taking over their jobs.
Many of them didn't even know how to use the internet—for those of us in Africa.
My Dad still struggles with using his smartphone, and he's just 70.
Has been practising law for over 30 years and doesn't have to worry about ChatGPT.
He still writes old school style—pen to paper!
Meanwhile, younger lawyers and students run to ChatGPT every second, asking it to write papers for them, and in so doing, they gradually lose vital reasoning and problem-solving skills that are only sharpened by pressure and use.
This rigour drilled into our parents a solid, undeniable set of raw skills that the present generation might not have if we are not careful.
We will never be able to stop AI from taking over.
But we can do something.
We can try our best to preserve the human link and touch so that younger people still have the chance to learn directly from older, skilled people and still allow AI in the position of enhancing and not outright replacing.
Instead of replacing human roles with AI, why can't we enhance those roles with AI?
We lay off 10 developers who have been with us for five or more years because we want to integrate a new model that can quickly replace 10 developers.
In doing that, we kill real human experience, expertise, and touch that no AI can replace.
Instead, why can't we think of enhancing and empowering the 10 developers with the AI you want to replace them with and blast their productivity levels 2,000% or more above the roofs and beyond!
Think the era of the Cyborg Worker, where workers are empowered by AI to do much more work instead of chasing away people who have spent years growing their creative and technical skills.
AI may excel now at doing the jobs of entry-level grads, like reading, writing reports and summaries, and following instructions, but it will eventually evolve beyond just doing ordinary stuff to handling more complex tasks, and those who feel that they are far from the reach of AI snatching their complex jobs will also start struggling with AI (the software engineer is the perfect example).
If we allow this culture of using AI to replace thousands of people without batting an eye today, all in the name of productivity, a time will come when there won't be jobs for anyone.
Because AI gets smarter and smarter, and if the current generation of workers who were trained on analogue principles now happens to finish their tenure in the world of work, passing that baton to the generation that started struggling with AI for office spaces and, in the process, lost parts of their essence as workers, the big question now is what will they pass on to the next generation?
It keeps getting diluted.
We need to create systems now that intelligently integrate human and AI capabilities without sacrificing real human connections and experience.
It's not innovation if we completely rely on AI!
Innovation is not that stupid.
The centre of innovation is human, and if we remove or dilute the humanity in innovation, then we have created something else.
A New Era?
We may be gradually entering a new era of human capital development and management.
Maybe there are things human beings can do that we've not yet discovered.
Will AI be the catalyst that helps us discover the hidden potential of human capital?
Or will AI also help us uncover new levels of productivity never seen before, where companies combining humans and AI can produce huge results in a very short time?
I believe that we will adjust to the new reality like we've always adjusted, but this here is slightly different from the adjustments we have had to make in the past, because here we are seeing before us technology that can mimic our thinking capability (or even surpass it).
We've never seen this before; the closest we ever came was the computer, and for the computer to work, we had to tell it what to do.
In this case, the technology can even tell us what to do and what not to do (in some scenarios).
What do you think?
Maybe I am missing something.
Share your thoughts