AI - Careful What You Wish For

Hello Human

I have been reading and thinking about ‘AI’ - Artificial Intelligence aka ‘AGI’ - Artificial General Intelligence, and I have to declare that I am a little uncomfortable - comfortably uncomfortable - but uncomfortable nonetheless.

There’s zero chance of me doing justice here to the massive social, economic, political, technical, and ethical issues that surrounds AI / AGI, but I figured I’d ‘riff’ a little on it, and see where it goes.

Hopefully I’ll get you thinking about AI / AGI too - if you’re not already thinking about it.

To kick the riff off, my ‘peg in the ground’ about AI / AGI is this:

- if you are a Human employed in a job of any sort, at any level, in an organisation in any industry, you’d best be thinking about how AI / AGI may be being geared up to replace you.

Yep, that’s right, I am calling it here in March 2024, the end game for AI / AGI is large-scale replacement of humans in organisations. Replace - not just help and enable.

Right now AI / AGI is new and shiny, and we all know how new and shiny goes in most workplaces right? It becomes’ the thing’, the ‘must have’, the ‘must do’. The latest fad, a bit of fun....

“Oh look at me I used ChatGPT.”

Using AI / AGI as a support tool - well and good. Saving you a bit of time and money; helps you to function a bit quicker - excellent. AI enables you to crack on with the more important tasks of the day - in your current job - no major harm is done.

Fun with ChatGPT

To digress... I had my own ‘fun' with ChatGPT in writing this month’s muse.

Check this out:

I asked ‘ChatGPT (v3.5) this question: What does Mark LeBusque do? Here’s the (unedited) answer:

“Mark LeBusque is known as a "Human Manager" and is an expert in humanizing the workplace. He focuses on helping organizations and individuals shift their mindset and behaviors to create more human-centric workplaces. LeBusque emphasizes the importance of building strong relationships, fostering trust, and promoting empathy and understanding among team members. He often works with leaders and teams to improve communication, collaboration, and overall well-being within organizations. LeBusque also provides coaching, consulting, and speaking services to help individuals and companies thrive in today's rapidly changing work environments.”

Not too bad for a 3 to 5-second delay. The American spelling needs some work and I’d personally shun the ‘expert’ label. On the other hand though - shifting mindsets, building relationships, fostering trust, improving communication - a solid synopsis. So too the grab on my coaching, consulting and speaking roles; and it plots me in organisations and changing work environments. ChatGPT makes no mention of my Books, Academy, or actual Programs though, but it got pretty close to nailing the essence of what I do.

So you’d figure if I needed a starter on a short bio ChatGPT might be helpful. No major harm done.

But dear Human, what’s really going on here - at pace and at scale?

“It’s no secret that the world’s largest and most powerful tech companies, including Google, Amazon, Meta and OpenAI, have a single-minded focus on creating Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Yet we currently know as little about what AGI might look like as we do about the risks that it might pose to humanity.”

That’s the lead paragraph of an opinion piece by Simon Longstaff of The Ethics Centre published on 27 February 2024. Longstaff had me at - ‘the risks that it (AGI) might pose to humanity’.

What’s the actual trajectory of change we Humans are on here with AI / AGI? And where are the essential conversations on that?

Elsewhere in his article ‘AI might pose a risk to humanity, but it could also transform it.’ Longstaff poses a couple of huge questions:

Can we imagine a future in which the economy is driven by the most efficient deployment of capital and machines – rather than by productive humans?

Can we imagine a society in which our meaning and worth are unrelated to having a job?

Big questions eh Human?

I am going to leave you here, for now, to imagine that future and that society.

I’ll be back in April though to continue this AI / AGI thread in Part 2. Spoiler alert - I'll be musing on the relevance today of ‘yesterday’s’ Luddites.

Go well Human

p.s Do you think it’s ironic that, under the cloud of today’s AI / AGI, the sub-title of my first book (published in 2017) is ‘Why robots are not the answer to business success’?