Will AI eliminate or augment your career/business?

This is probably the CENTRAL question today, whether you're a teenager considering which field of study to get into at college or university, a midcareer professional re-evaluating your options, a freelancer seeking to automate tasks, an entrepreneur launching a new product or business, or a business owner searching for new competitive advantages.

The common element among all the different types of workers cited above, is this: How they perceive and understand AI will determine whether AI will destroy their economic value OR augment their intelligence so they create more value, thus more profits.

If you think of AI as machine learning or deep learning, which is done by big tech companies (the famous GAFA gang -- Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple; now add Microsoft which recently bought Nuance for $16B), then there's little you can do unless you work at those companies or at big banks or giant corporations that have the resources to create and maintain such AIs.

Fortunately, ML or DL is only a subset of the AI field.

This is the main argument I submitted a few days ago in a Zoom conference (www.tinyurl.com/intelartificielle).

I posited that the winners in the AI-driven economy will work in either Building 1 (intelligence augmentation) or Building 2 (machine learning, deep learning).

In Building 1, the focus is on developing and enhancing your human intelligence. Anyone who is ambitious and committed, can succeed in this building.

I even created a systematic sequence to guide your progress so you can go as high as you can and reap the economic rewards that you deserve:

Knowledge --> Intelligence --> Expert systems --> Intelligence augmentation

Knowledge is so central to this process that we can rewrite the sequence above as:

Knowledge acquisition

--> Knowledge application

--> Knowledge codification

--> Knowledge automation

I help my students to acquire (permanently) new knowledge by creating acronyms such as AIDA, OSTAIR, P.R.O.J.E.C.T.S., ELFIC, QUEST, etc.

How do you know if you've successfully acquired new knowledge?

Teach it.

If you can't teach it (without using PowerPoint slides or any aid), then you KNOW it.

The next challenge, then, is to get into the real world and APPLY what you know.

That's when you progressively become a professional.

However, your personal/professional growth will stop at some point because you don't know the science or mechanics of how to become a true expert.

The handbook by Anders Ericsson is the ONLY book of its kind to teach you how to become a TRUE expert -- worldclass, etc.

Most professionals/managers are stuck at the second phase (intelligence) and cannot proceed to the next phase (expert systems) because they DON'T KNOW WHAT IT IS THAT THEY DO KNOW.

The remedy, as mentioned, is to simply TEACH WHAT YOU KNOW.

Start by creating a simple course outline so you can SEE exactly what you know and are thus able to teach to others.

Alternatively, you can start to create short videos explaining what you know (five or ten minutes per video should suffice).

For example, in my case, by creating three digital marketing courses, I've codified what I know. These courses are now EXTERNAL to my brain and anyone in the world can follow those courses (which are playlists on Youtube).

I will create soon a $20 Paypal Buy button so you can access those three courses.

To help people understand these 4 phases, I explain that in Building 1, there are 4 different floors:

Floor 1: Knowledge acquisition (this is where students are)

Floor 2: Intelligence deployment (this is where professionals and managers are)

Floor 3: Expert systems (this is where teachers, consultants, and programmers are). Teachers MUST have a course that others can follow WITHOUT the teacher's presence -- on Teachable.com for instance)

Floor 4: Intelligence augmentation (this is where the likes of Tony Stark are, they create/use a personal AI assistant to help them so they become super-creative and super-productive)

This AI keynote is so crucial to the success of ANYONE that I will share it with all parents on this planet. Your kids CANNOT succeed and thrive in the AI-driven economy without knowing about the secret Building 1, which is the ONLY way to make progress if Building 2 is out of the question.

Luckily, young people will, in my opinion, embrace AI since they are much more familiar and comfortable with new technologies than their Gen X or Baby Boomer counterparts.

We are indeed rapidly advancing toward an economy where "skills" can be downloaded either to your phone/computer or your brain as easily (or almost as easily) as Neo download an app into his skull in the movie The Matrix.

For instance, I don't think I'll be teaching Email Marketing or Online Marketing Research for long since I am developing software that will enable ANYONE to do effective email marketing or marketing research.

Project management teachers, however, will probably still be needed because their are soft skills to be taught (leadership, problem solving, risk analysis/management, interpersonal communications, motivating one's team, etc.).

(to be continued)