We’ve all probably awoken to a newsfeed or a social media account populated with comments about killer AI robots and Skynet right around the corner. We might have read about the chatbot that tried to convince a journalist to leave his wife. And we’ve likely read about how “deep fakes”, or fake videos masquerading as real life people, will throw this election year into chaos.
Some of these stories are overblown and play on our fears (the killer robot scenario is very unlikely in the foreseeable future), but others, such as deep fakes, might not be too far off the mark. Indeed, it’s possible you might have seen a deep fake without recognizing it for what it was.
It is understandable that in the midst of all these chaotic AI-related developments we join the chorus or simply bury our heads. But there’s another way of looking at this — one in which we are not the victim in which AI is doing something “to” us but one in which the ‘AI’ is doing something “with” us.
Fine you say. But what about my job? How can I harness the power of AI if it’s going to take my job from me? These are reasonable concerns and exactly how AI will end up disrupting and displacing jobs remains to be seen. A recent New York Times article, on the surface suggests that displacement might be coming, citing that 80% of white collar jobs will have 10% of the work being done by AI. And that 20% or white-collar jobs will have around 50% of the work impacted by AI.
However, one can look at those figures another way. 10%-50% speaks to plenty of room for a “human in the loop,” somebody who needs to wield AI. In many cases, if displacement is coming, it is in the form of those who know how to wield AI vs. those who don’t. Or, perhaps more precisely: those who know how to use ChatGPT really well will displace those who only know how to use it moderately well.
If this doesn’t shift the doomsday narrative in your mind, here are two ways to think about it. Learning how to use ChatGPT and similar AI tools now–and learning to use them well–is potentially the most critical skill set you can gain, especially if you are in white-collar, or “knowledge jobs.” This is a golden opportunity to gain a competitive edge at a moment while many are still scrambling to figure out how to best use AI, that is if they are not burying their heads in the proverbial sand.
The second way to think of the increasing importance of our relationship with AI is the empowerment narrative. Instead of seeing it as a shadowy foe, let’s look at it as an indefatigable collaborator, thought partner, and just about anything else we ask it to be. That’s because we can shape how we use AI to level up almost everything we do. In essence, you can become a better version of you–more productive, more efficient, even more creative–if you know how to properly use AI.
I believe this is where our relationship with AI is evolving. The greatest success will not be from AI, or from humans alone. Instead, it will emerge from a collaboration between our minds and this new, strange but ultimately learnable technology — an “Intelligence Partnership” that will set us on a road to going farther and doing more than we were able to do before.
Compare that to the outcome of ignoring the technology, you are simply disadvantaged against someone, who pre-AI, might not have been as talented and able as you are.
To illustrate this empowerment in my own life, here are two examples, one relatively low stakes (depending on your view of gardening) and the other very high stakes–wowing the interviewer and landing an important role.
I’ve long been the killer of poor plants. This is not on account of good intentions or even diligence, but more a result of me bungling into gardening later, armed with a hose and little horticultural knowledge. Typically, I buy plants from the nursery. Yet, even with meticulous watering, something often seems to go awry, and it’s usually wilt not bloom.
There was blood orange sapling that I had high hopes for and dreams of one day plucking ripe blood oranges from the tree and joyfully engorging them. I bought extra fertilizer and compost, watered the tree regularly…and the leaves started to sag, its growth not half of what I’d imagined.
I could have resigned myself to eating previously frozen blood oranges from the produce section of my local grocery, but I decided to take a photo of the sapling and uploaded the picture into ChatGPT. It mentioned the clover leaf looking things all around the sapling, and educated me on nitrogen-fixing plants. It seems that having a few around is important to the general ecosystem of my backyard, but in this case the sapling was being crowded out. I jumped to action, removing the clover-looking plants, as well as some other nearby weeds, and then uploaded another image to ChatGPT. I apparently had “missed a few spots,” but things were looking much better. Now my little sapling is well on its way to treehood, and I’m hoping for a bounty of blood oranges soon.
While losing a sapling can certainly be anxiety inducing, it pales in comparison to the stress over interviewing for a job. You can prep and imagine questions the interviewer might ask. But for me — and I suspect many of us — simulating the actual interview doesn’t go much beyond coming up with a few hypothetical questions and then writing down possible responses to rehearse in my head.
With ChatGPT, what I was able to do was upload the job description into the input box, along with the hiring manager’s LinkedIn profile (which was a quick copy and paste job). This information was to feed the AI the most relevant and specific context necessary. I then had the AI come up with simulated interview questions that this person would likely ask. But that’s not the most exciting part.
Next, I opened up the ChatGPT phone app, using its relatively realistic sounding voice avatar. I asked them to play the part of the hiring manager and pepper me with questions. I responded in real time, preparing that part of my brain that actually speaks on the fly for the interview. Afterwards, I asked the AI for feedback on the interview, and then did several more rounds, incorporating the feedback.
Had I cloned myself and not used the AI, the outcomes I’ve had across many interview rounds would have been vastly different. My clone would not have done nearly as well as I did. This perfectly illustrates the collaboration “with” AI to empower us, making us much better at a specific task than we would have been without the AI.
If you’ve been unsure about this whole AI thing, I encourage you to take the first step of simply playing around with it for an hour. Have fun and see what you learn. Then come back to the AI and play around even more, building off what you learned (and don’t forget to ask ChatGPT for feedback on your progress–yes, yet another remarkable use case for this multifaceted technology.) Additionally, think of all the creative things you can ask the AI (taking my thriving sapling as inspiration), and see how it can enhance many of the activities, hobbies and pursuits you value.
These first steps will set the groundwork for you to build off of. You will then be able to leverage your new skill set in areas that are job and career related. You will start to witness an emerging “intelligence partnership,” as you and the AI collaborate on ever greater things. And you will not look anxiously upon our AI age but optimistically, as you empower not just yourself but those around you, who look up to you for your initiative. Or, at the very least, you’ll have a thriving garden filled with ripe and abundant fruit.
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