The human touch

Thinking back on 2023 the one thing that spring to mind is of course ChatGPT and the rise / acceptance of AI. The question is: will it be a net good or net evil? Will we be able to curtail the risks while having most of the potential benefits. Unlike with social media where we, me included, thought the benefits far outweigh the risks. We were clearly wrong. I too thought anonymity was important, now I think it's the biggest problem. We should have had guardrails.

Will we be able to be better with AI? I think we will. As I've seen more negative stories in the press and more politicians at least talking about this than ever before. The question is: will these guardrails be the right ones? I very much doubt it and here's why.

I recently had a great conversation with one of the great legal minds in the area of IT and AI: Arnoud💻 Engelfriet on the new AI act (read the transcript here, in Dutch, as we thought it was to good to keep private). In short: the new AI act seems to think humans are superior when it comes to AI on certain aspects (like emotion recognition, that is explicitly forbidden in the workplace) while scientific research (published in Nature) shows us humans are terrible at it.

Automating inequality

Virginia Eubanks wrote in her book Automating Inequality that algoritmes are now making everything worse, but forgot to mention that every one of those algoritmes was based on the way humans were doing the work to begin with. She said that it used to at least have a human in the loop correcting the algorithm, but that only meant that in a rare case an exception to the rule helped out. While the rule itself was bad. And 100% of the examples she gave in the book were actually the automation of what had been done manually. It's not the algorithms that are the issue, it's the humans designing and executing them.

And with AI, nobody is designing them, they are just learning of what we thought was just and... we no the world isn't really equal, or an amazing place right? So we do need a human in the loop, but preferably one at correcting the algorithm and those should be trained as psychologists, ethicists and philosophers. You know, the people we love to ignore because they don't speak from the gut.

The age of AI

But we are moving into the age of AI. There is no doubt about that. Now we need to make sure we have guardrails in check and I do love the fact there's an AI act coming.

As I wrote in my book with Kevin Wheeler on Talent Acquisition we are at a Gutenberg moment (credits for this term go to Azeem Azhar ) and we need to rethink many societal issues. Just like when the printing press was developed we needed to develop legal rights for creation and royalties, we now need to rethink those.

We also need to rethink laws on liabilities. Who's liable when a self driving car hits a pedestrian? And who's liable when a human driver does if you know the self driving car is much safer for example? Could human driving become a risk of negligence? Society needs to adapt to this new world and we need to do so quickly. But to do this we need to have fundamental debates on what do we want our societies to look like and that can't be done quickly, so we're in an amazing catch 22.

The age of talent

The rise of AI also leads to a new labor market, my main area of expertise. We need to unlearn what we've learned in order to thrive. As knowledge isn't as important anymore since AI is able to make a junior engineer operate at the level of a medior or lower level senior in months. Same goes for contact centre agents and probably most occupations.

But we also know that middle out economics works best for a society. As Bidenomics is showing, not the trickle down, but grow from the middle out helps societies at large (Pitchforks economics is a great source of information on this).

We are moving into the age of talent. True talent. As AI can do the work of 100 ordinary (wo)men, it can't do the work of one extraordinary (wo)man. And those extraordinary people will make a major difference. And many people 'just do their jobs', something that's just not good enough anymore.

Now I also believe everybody has talent, just not for everything. Everybody is an 8, but not on all things and very often not on the job they are actually doing. I see often someone being good, or sometimes even just decent, at one aspect of their job, but no their entire job. In those cases there are two possibilities in the age of AI. One is that you carve the job up and the other is that AI can do the aspects you don't excel in.

With the age of AI we're also moving to the age of talent, but that looks very different that our current situation. Just doing your job isn't going to cut it in the age of talent. And that doesn't mean work harder, it means be better.

A time of transition.

A transition to any new age has always had major turmoil. Right now we are moving to a multi polar world when it comes to world power, something we have not seen since the end of the cold war or perhaps even since 1945. Combined with the rise of AI we're also moving to the age of talent.

Recent developments are things me and many futurists feared when the internet came on the scene. Me and many others said every major transition was always accompanied by a war, but we hoped this time would be different. I still hope the wars will be contained, but I fear the worst with elections going in the directions they are going.

End note: I especially fear for my own country the Netherlands in this new age of talent as we do not celebrate our greatest talents, but we tend to burn them down or chase them away. We have many sayings like 'hoge bomen vangen veel wind' and 'je kop boven het maaiveld uitsteken' that attest to our culture of loving the mediocre person.

Bas is a professional snoop. He's a futurist with a focus on the world of work, recruitment and HR technology.

He's a much requested speaker on events all over the world.

His recent book it called Talent Acquisition Excellence.

He organises Digitaal-Werven