Finding purpose in the age of AI

Just as water erodes rock to create the canyons we see in our geography, time erodes what we were, what we are, and what we will be.

All our achievements, all our defeats, all our ego, all our scars, and all our things will become memories that fade during our lifetime and disappear completely within a couple of generations.

These are some of the thoughts I have, as my wife and I work every weekend to sell, give away, and throw away our belongings, to start a new journey. But also, as the weeks go by, we begin to feel the nostalgia of the people we will leave behind, and the comfort of a “put together” life that will now become a new set of Lego to assemble.

In Japanese, there is a word, Nagori, to express exactly this feeling we have. The nostalgia of a season that ends. I highly recommend the book of this name by the author Ryoko Sekiguchi. But this nostalgia also opens the doors to new perspectives. To value what is truly important. I have found myself not wanting more of what I once desired, wanting only what I need, but realizing that, for this new journey, for now, I need almost nothing.

This existentialist experience has also become an evaluation of the purpose of things, and of the purpose of life and work itself. In a society that is heading towards a revolution in which artificial intelligence will affect all spheres of work: repetitive, operational, intellectual, creative, and strategic, what will be the purpose of getting up every day to do something? In fact, what is the value of something created 100% through AI? Is it anything more than the value of the computational resources to create it?

The reality is that AI, especially invisible AI, will be present in all jobs, in all tasks. Already today, when programming, for example, we can choose from numerous assistants that substantially increase the productivity of a person who decides to integrate in a committed way with the tool. This completely changes the purpose of work, the purpose of doing. The purpose of an “operational” job, in many, if not all 100% digital industries, will be focused on what you are going to create with your time today, and not so much on what you are going to do in that time. To put it in development terms, what are you going to create with your AI agents today, instead of what are you going to program today. And this same logic can be applied to music, 2D and 3D art jobs, digital marketing, etc.

I don’t have the answers to all these concerns, but I sense that the solution will require involving the company’s transformative purpose more in the day-to-day work of people. If the “operational/creative” work now must be a job that requires not only doing a task (no matter how complex) but being responsible for the result of a group of agents that help to carry it out, there must be a greater alignment between what the individual wants to do with his life and what the company wants to do with the product of the tasks of the individuals.

Yes, as water erodes rock, time erodes the trace of our existence. But that existence can, even in the midst of different rules of what work will be, continue to be meaningful through the impact it has on the well-being of the community it impacts.

Being this the case, if my purpose is to make an organization that builds tech that helps humans thrive, I must create an environment in which my team finds purpose in making this “thriving” happen.