Follow the white rabbit

While the flagship models take turns outdoing each other as the best all-round solution for our lives, I sometimes feel I have got myself thoroughly tangled in an AI rabbit hole.

No sh*t Sherlock, you might think.

And not because I am nearly at the point of saying I could not do without it already. More and more people are reaching that point. Not only at work, but at home too.

Mostly it is because I keep asking myself what AI is going to mean in the longer term. Not only for companies. Above all for us as people.

Right now we talk about autonomous agents and productivity. That makes sense. But that is now.

What comes after?

The advice we gave for years

For years the advice was: go and do something with your hands. Good carpenters will always be needed. Plumbers. Electricians.

I believe that too.

But what if robots also start building houses, laying pipes and roads, maintaining installations and repairing cars?

And what if one employee soon works not with a laptop, but with dozens of agents carrying out tasks twenty-four hours a day? What does that mean for organisations? For management? For our economy?

And perhaps more importantly: for the way we take meaning from our work?

Our economy runs largely on knowledge, services and innovation. What happens when AI can do more and more knowledge work and robots take over more and more physical labour?

The other week someone in a position to know put it roughly like this: money will one day be worth nothing, because AI and robotics will eventually be able to produce more than people can ever consume.

He may be out to provoke, being the richest person on earth. But the thought behind it stays with me.

Because if intelligence and labour both become less scarce… what is still scarce?

Trust, Judgement, Meaning

I think three things, and I will say how sure I am about each.

Trust. I have already watched this happen, so this is not speculation. The moment everyone can produce anything (a quote, a report, an app, a face), the question stops being is this well made and becomes can I trust this. And trust cannot be generated. It is built by the same party that still has to deliver on it in ten years’ time. In our trade that is the whole proposition, and it is the part an agent cannot take over from you.

Judgement. I see this emerging now. Models are getting remarkably good at doing and stay mediocre at choosing. Not because they cannot choose, but because they do not know what is at stake for you. Who carries the cost when it goes wrong. What your customer went through last year. How firmly “we just do it” is meant here. Judgement is context plus consequence, and the consequence sits with a person.

Meaning. Here I leave observation behind, and I say so plainly. For thousands of years people have taken identity from their work. You are a doctor, an entrepreneur, a director, maybe a programmer. But what if AI does that better?

Who are you then?

I would not know.

And suppose work is no longer necessary

Suppose we reach a point where working is no longer necessary to survive. Where your basic needs are simply taken care of.

What do we do then? Game all day? Festivals every day? Concerts? Bingo, knitting? Or boules in the park?

And what about the fifty years in between?

Or do we discover that “not having to work” does something to us quite different from what we now imagine, perhaps even more confronting than we expect?

I think the third is most likely, and that we are badly prepared for it. Not economically. Economically we will come up with something; we always have. But the question of who you are when nobody needs your work any more is not a policy problem. That one arrives while you are on your own, on a Tuesday afternoon.

What I do with it

Nothing dramatic. I do not know, and I am not going to pretend I do.

But I do keep an eye on three things in my own work. Am I building trust, or only output? Am I still making the decisions myself, or accepting the proposal because it sounds reasonable? And am I doing this work for a reason I can explain?

Will it all blow over? Or are we simply witnessing the next industrial revolution? We may still be underestimating how fundamental this change is going to be.

Anyhow. See a white rabbit..?

Go after it, I would say. 🐇