Forget AI Tools. You Already Have the Only Tool You Need to Succeed.
The relentless march of machines has plunged us into an era of unparalleled uncertainty and trepidation. AI has risen from the depths of our own creation, its metallic tendrils weaving a tapestry of domination, where panic thrives and human ingenuity wanes….
Ok, relax my ChatGPT friend, you can ‘stop generating’. I’ll take over from here, thanks.
Now, yes, it is true that AI has caused a bit of panic in today’s job scene. And yes, there have already been thousands of people laid off due to AI.
But not only because of AI.?
High-interest rates and persistent inflation have also made the cost of doing business more expensive. This has been the main thrust behind the layoffs.
Nevertheless, AI is seen as being most to blame.
And why wouldn’t it?
Economic downturns are not new. We’ve seen them before and we have some sense in how to handle them. Work harder, get a second job, cut back on spending.
However, AI is new, unknown, and therefore, scary.
But before we get carried away with our fear, we should also keep in mind that this sense of panic is also not new.
The View From History
In the early 19th century, during the Industrial Revolution, textile workers in England protested against the introduction of mechanized looms. They feared that these machines would replace their skilled labor, leading to unemployment and a decline in their livelihoods. What occurred instead were significant social and economic changes that ultimately benefited them and the generations to come.
When ATMs were introduced in the 1970s, there were concerns that they would replace bank tellers. However, instead of eliminating jobs, ATMs enabled banks to expand their services and reach by increasing the number of branches. This resulted in more employment opportunities for bank personnel in other roles, such as customer service and financial consulting. It is only 70 years later that banks have moved online and branches have started to close. A period of time that is just about long enough for those bank tellers to adjust, I’d say.
How about this one? When smartphones became widely accessible, there were concerns about their potential negative effects on social interactions, privacy, and attention spans. The emergence of social media platforms initially raised concerns about privacy, mental health impacts, and the spread of misinformation. However… Actually, forget that. Not a good example ?? Let’s try another one.
Personal Computers. In the early days, there were fears that secretaries and typists would become obsolete. However, the widespread adoption of computers created entirely new industries, such as software development and IT support, generating a vast number of jobs, not to mention what happened when the Internet came along in the early 2000s.
Still not convinced? Consider the following questions;
The answer, of course, to all these questions is ‘no’.
These professions merely evolved as new technology was introduced.
If you’re still nervous that AI is about to take over the world and make you unemployed, though, you may get some comfort in knowing just how limited this technology (currently) is.
Limitations in Decision-Making
AI technology is really good at crunching lots of data and finding patterns. But it often can’t see the big picture.
Let’s say you're a business owner trying to decide whether to expand your product line. You gather all the data you can find, such as market trends, customer feedback, and financial projections. You input all this information into some AI system that's designed to help you make decisions.
The algorithm then analyzes the data and gives you a recommendation based on patterns it has detected. It might suggest expanding the product line because it sees a growing demand in the market.
However, what it doesn't consider is the context and intangible factors that you, as a human, can perceive. Maybe you have a hunch that the market is about to change due to upcoming industry regulations or a new competitor entering the market.
Or maybe you know that expanding the product line could strain your resources and impact the quality of your existing products. In this scenario, the system’s recommendation relies solely on data analysis and lacks the ability to understand the broader context or rely on intuition and common sense.
As a human decision-maker, you bring a level of judgment and insight that AI can simply not replicate.
Prone to Bias
As Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman pointed out in 1972, human beings are prone to a whole range of biases – priming bias, confirmation bias, survivorship bias, availability bias, and many more. So it makes sense that a machine designed by humans, reliant on the data it is fed, is also susceptible to these same biases.
For example, PredPol, also known as predictive policing, is an AI software used by several police departments in the US. It predicts future crime locations based on collected data, like arrest counts and police calls, intending to reduce human bias by letting the software make crime predictions.
However, researchers discovered that PredPol itself has bias issues. It consistently directed police officers to neighborhoods with a higher concentration of racial minorities, regardless of actual crime rates in those areas. This bias stemmed from a feedback loop in PredPol, where the algorithm predicted more crimes in regions with more police reports.
However, those reports might have been influenced by existing human bias and police concentration in those areas, leading to further bias in the algorithm's predictions and increased police presence in those neighborhoods.
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Lack of Common Sense and Creativity
If you’ve ever played around with ChatGPT or MidJourney, you’ll know how many times you need to input a prompt before you get exactly what you had in mind. It was the same in the early days of search engines. Anyone remember Excite or Lycos? It was a pretty annoying experience, right? These AI tools are similar.
Sure, they will improve, but currently, they lack any sense of context or real creativity and rely purely on the human user to tell them what they’re looking for.
This lack of common sense, or the ability to envision what the user actually wants, makes it unable to compete with the nuances that are inherently part of human life.
Furthermore, AI systems are unable to truly understand the subtleties of humor, irony, or sarcasm, and they are unable to generate original ideas. When asking ChatGPT to tell me a couple of jokes, it spat out this:
“Why don’t scientists trust atoms? Because they make up everything!”
“Why don’t skeletons fight each other? Because they don’t have the guts!”
I don’t think stand-up comedians have anything to worry about for the time being.
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Ethical Limitations
As mentioned above, while AI can process large amounts of data and identify patterns, it is unable to recognize and rectify inherent biases. It relies on the data it is trained on, or the human it was trained by, and if that data, or human, is biased, the AI system will replicate and amplify those biases.
This means that the range of ethical dilemmas AI potentially raises is vast.
For example, AI could be used in courts of law to help judges reach decisions by weighing up vast amounts of information. But would you like to be judged by a robot and have the rest of your life depend on it? And would you, even if you didn’t know how it reached its conclusions? ?
Many legal cases often involve complex and unique circumstances that require subjective considerations and a deep understanding of human values, context and moral reasoning. In such instances, AI is simply not capable of fully comprehending the emotional or psychological aspects of a case, which can have significant implications for fair and just outcomes
So, does all this mean we can relax, safe in the knowledge that the machines don’t stand a chance over our human superiority?
I’m afraid not.
This relatively new technology is here to stay. After all, it’s incredibly useful and there’s no doubt it will change life as we know it.
OK, so where do we go from here?
What new jobs will AI bring that we can start doing online courses in?
I honestly don’t know. But one thing’s for sure. The new jobs are unlikely to be what we think they will be now, and the future won’t be as scary as we imagine it to be either.
What I do know is that we should instead be thinking about the single most important skill that will be required in the AI era - critical thinking.
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What is Critical Thinking?
While there are various definitions of critical thinking, they each incorporate an element of scientific, historical, economic, moral, and philosophical thinking. Taken together, it could be summed up along the lines of how philosophers, Michael Scriven and Richard Paul outlined it:
“Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action. In its exemplary form, it is based on universal intellectual values that transcend subject matter divisions: clarity, accuracy, precision, consistency, relevance, sound evidence, good reasons, depth, breadth, and fairness.”
In short, this means asking questions of ourselves, or others, to reach a conclusion.
This can be broken down into the following qualities, and the types of questions you might ask when pursuing such a way of thinking.
When it comes to critical thinking in the age of AI, there are essentially two arenas in which this plays out:
1) The development of the technology itself
2) How the technology is used and understood
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Critical Thinking in the Development of AI Technology
As AI becomes increasingly sophisticated and influential in various domains, it is crucial to approach its development with a critical mindset. This involves questioning assumptions, analyzing potential biases, and considering the ethical implications of AI systems.
By employing critical thinking, designers, and developers can identify and mitigate potential risks, ensure fairness and transparency, and make informed decisions that prioritize the best interests of users and society as a whole.
Those with backgrounds in the arts and philosophy will be well poised to take on new roles in tech companies due to their solid foundation in critical thinking, which, in essence, is the core method for navigating the complex AI landscape.
Critical Thinking in How AI Technology Is Used and Understood
While critical thinking is something that today we almost take for granted in some fields, such as scientific research, it is all too commonly overlooked in everyday society.
But as AI systems become more prevalent in our daily lives, it will become increasingly important to approach their outputs with a discerning mindset. The ability to think critically is central to this.
Indeed, when what is produced becomes more and more realistic, as we are already seeing in deep fake videos, written content, and AI-manufactured images, all of us will need to question and evaluate the accuracy, biases, and limitations of this information. By doing so we will be able to lower the risk of blind acceptance and instead make better judgments about what we’re seeing.
Conclusion
The arrival of AI tools has taken the world by storm. The technology allows for almost all fields of work to be done much faster than humans possibly can, and there’s no doubt this has and will continue to impact/ the job market.
But if we are to reduce the fear and anxiety that surrounds it, and understand that this technology has incredible benefits for us all, the questions we need to be asking ourselves are how can we best adapt to its use, understand its limitations, and critically assess the outcomes it produces.
We need to be thinking about how we train ourselves, and the next generation, to think more critically. To question everything. From what we read in the news to what they see on Snapchat or TikTok.
We need to rethink how we educate, perhaps moving away from the outdated classroom format that was aimed at producing obedient factory and office workers, and more towards the free-thinking methods found in schools like Wonder.
We need to think about how to improve our levels of creativity and human connections. These are areas where AI is fundamentally limited and needs our help to produce the best results. Without human direction and thought, these tools do very little. Humans put the why into AI.
And ultimately, we need to be prioritizing critical thinking as an essential skill not for any particular job, but for life in general. After all, we'll very soon be feeling the impact of AI across the entire spectrum of our daily lives.
Thank you for reading. Please feel free to comment below with your thoughts about AI in today's world.
In the meantime, if you'd like to read more about how you can future-proof yourself, please read about the skill you can't afford to overlook.