You can never get enough of what you really don’t want. How helpful is it to get the right answer to the wrong question? Is ‘the answer’ what we really want – that is easily supplied by artificial intelligence (AI) prompt? Will AI agents make many knowledge workers redundant? How is it that we are so fascinated by the soap opera of business events, that we miss the big picture?
Don’t despair, there is some good news. “So far there is little evidence that AI is destroying jobs. The reason is unclear. Perhaps companies are not actually making much use of it. Or maybe it is merely helping existing workers to work faster, rather than replacing them,” reports The Economist.
AI is a game changer, but it depends on what game you are engaged in. Applications like ChatGPT first burst onto the scene in November 2022.
Now there are a wealth of free applications that will write the essay and make a video clip. And, problem solving AI agents, will take things to the next level.
In the last 20 years, robotics has often displaced the need for labour in industry, with all sorts of car workers out in the street, needing to reskill. Having upset demand for labour in industry, the fear is that now AI is coming for the knowledge workers.
All those routine repetitive tasks that were once best done by humans, can be done equally well by AI, that does not get a tummy ache and works relentlessly around the clock, 24/7. Even the lower tier ‘professions’ are thought to be at risk.
AI may be able to structure and write a polished legal contact, do a set of financial statements, and even audit a set of accounts equally well. But the funny thing is, some jobs are less likely to be impacted; the boda boda, plumber or baggage handler.
“AI agents are thought of as ‘next-level’ AI because they represent a leap forward from the current generation of generative AI popularised by ChatGPT,” writes Bernard Marr.
Essentially, AI agents can make decisions, solve problems, think for themselves, achieve complex goals, automating tasks that would otherwise require human resources. In other words: doing the job of the knowledge worker.
Journey, not the destination
In all this drama about events, the impact of AI, one point stands out. Real issue is not the answer, but how you get to the solution. What is important is the journey, not the destination. Experiences, growth, and lessons learned along the way, are more valuable than the final outcome.
‘Who is to blame?’ That is the question managers often ask. But the real insight comes asking what is the system? Like a ‘make noise’ drama queen, understandably we tend to be mesmerised by events.
We can even fool ourselves by seeing the business world as a series of events. The daily news is about who did this, why, who is in, who is out, prices went up, agreements have been signed, this is going to be built, this project is delayed or scrapped.
Events are the ‘usual’, though some are spectacular. Like the tip of an iceberg in the Arctic Sea, events are the most visible part of the larger, complex system we call ‘business’.
All these events are outputs of a system. Even the creation of AI is an output of a system. “You can’t navigate well in an interconnected, feedback dominated world unless you take your eyes off the short-term events and look for the long-term behaviours and structure,” writes system thinker Donella Meadows.
“When a systems thinker encounters a problem, the first thing he or she does is look for the data, time graphs, the history of the system. That’s because the long-term behaviour provides clues to the underlying systems structure. Any structure is the key to understanding, not just what is happening, but why,” advises Meadows.
We tend to think that changing the elements of a system, the parts and the players will have a big effect. But changing the elements has the least impact.
If you change the staff at the financial institution’s head office, it is still a bank. Your body, like a tree, is constantly replacing it cells, but it still goes on being itself.
What really changes a system are its interconnections and shifting the purpose. Change the rules of football, to basketball, and it’s a whole new game.
A change in function – purpose of the system, the organisation has a profound impact. For instance, in a secondary school, is the purpose simply to make money for the owners, or is it to transform young lives through inculcating an intoxicating fascination with learning, teaching students to see the world through the eyes of their discipline. Or better yet, be able to have them see the world through the eyes of several [interconnected] disciplines.
Like a student who has crammed for an exam, AI is ready to regurgitate the answers on call. Rote, machine learning has a role, but it can never replace the need for critical thinking questions, and instil a lifelong love of ‘learning how to learn’.
