Tool Worship in the Age of AI (Part II)

Hello, and welcome to Future Solving, my newsletter for leaders and managers navigating what it means to lead in the era of AI.

Today, we're continuing the discussion on Tool Worship in the Age of AI (the first article is here if you haven't had a chance to read it yet). The summary is that tools have become the starting point for transformation (e.g. "AI Transformation" is akin to "Electric Screwdriver Transformation") and tools have been mystified (e.g. some "AI Leaders" today communicate like priests in the 1500s before the Protestant Reformation).

Have you read or heard some version of this statement in the news or from a colleague: "AI is coming for your job"?

Tools are personified

There is a historical pattern of personifying tools, but with the latest advancements in artificial intelligence, personification has grown exponentially.

1. "Hallucinations" are incorrect output from Language Models which would be considered "bugs" or "errors" in software, but because it's the field of AI, it's been personified.
2. "AI is..." whether it's coming for your job, passing an exam, or analyzing - each of these is a personification. Using AI as the subject of a sentence is like saying "Screwdrivers are remodeling our homes." To use analysis as an example, AI actually isn't analyzing the way we think about analysis as people. Rather, it is applying math based on patterns of human-generated data or human-directed learning to achieve a similar outcome as a human analysis, but AI cannot analyze in and of itself.
3. Pictures of Humanoid Robots. Nearly every article or post about the future or work or artificial intelligence features a humanoid robot - almost none of which actually exist (at all!) or are about the subject of the article (e.g. ChatGPT should not be depicted as a humanoid robot with a face when it's actually just code running on servers in datacenters)

Each of these personifications generates a lack of clarity (which I like to call the "Digital Fog") that makes it more difficult to have productive conversations on where and how these tools can be useful, and what impact it will have on the workplace and for the people within an organization and society more broadly.

Tools take the blame

In the history of humankind, no technology has ever taken anyone's job. Leaders and managers have used technology to replace human jobs.

Blaming job loss on tools such as AI by saying "AI is coming for your job" or even "a person using AI is coming for your job" distracts from the more important question, "Does your boss or leadership consider you expendable?" "Would they replace you if given the opportunity?"

That's the central question at the heart of the AI job loss hype that is so rarely discussed.

Earlier this year, more than 238,000 people in tech were laid off. This was not because of AI or any other tool, but because the leadership wanted to strengthen their financial positions in the face of a potential recession.

From the moment a technology investment decision is made, it will take at least 6 months, if not a couple of years before it is ready to be implemented. So if that is targeting "headcount reduction," leadership has more than enough time to make a plan for upskilling, reskilling, or transitioning workers to other departments within the organization.

For leaders who do not consider their team members expendable, this current market condition creates an opportunity to provide clarity and assurance, by sharing with your teams that as you look into opportunities to harness the potential of artificial intelligence and other tools, you do so with the value of honoring your people, their tribal knowledge, and the culture of the organization. That your goal is to augment, not replace. Then share which leaders are on the committee looking into this and offer to hold office hours to answer any questions or concerns from team members.

Because uncertainty registers in the brain the same way as physical pain, this is important not only for productivity, but for taking care of the people who are taking care of your customers.

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I’d love to know if you're seeing these dynamics at play in your workplace or if you're seeing this in the market as well.

Thanks for reading,

Brian

Brian Evergreen is the author of Autonomous Transformation (a Next Big Idea Club "Must-Read" shortlisted for the Thinkers50 2023 Breakthrough Idea Award), an executive advisor, Senior Fellow at The Conference Board, and the host of the Future Solving Podcast (eighth episode with Tiffani Bova, 2x WSJ Bestselling Author and honored 2x by Thinkers50, can be replayed here).