The Wave of Generative AI is Meant to be Constructive. Stop Making it Appear Destructive

Disclaimer: I don't claim to be a subject matter expert on Generative AI as I am learning like the majority of people. I am taking a pragmatic approach as nearly every company, everything, and everyone can't get online, turn on the TV, or walk into a store without some sort marketing moniker about AI.

I urge you to take a hard look at the image above. The original image was posted from a forum within LinkedIn called @Premium Career Group. It was posted in relation to reputation, but upon seeing it, I associated it with today's professional landscape in relation to Generative AI. Companies such as Microsoft, NVIDIA, Google, Amazon, Apple, Adobe, and a slew more are leading the way in finding practical ways to apply AI. Generative AI is here to stay as more companies continue to investigate how to best adopt it. Note how I said investigate and not adopt ... yet. There is undoubtedly a vast amount of organizations who are investing and and seeking new ways to work, inventing means to leverage AI.

In January, I published an entry titled Disruptions Aren't Bleak - They're Breakthroughs, citing the cyclical waves of innovations that we are in right now with Automation and AI. The phenomena of AI is nothing new, just becoming more mainstream, as evidenced by 美国斯坦福大学 , who are on their 6th annual edition of an Artificial Intelligence Index Report. Think of that. For 6 years, Stanford has been research and publishing the progress of AI right under the general public's nose. The information has always been there, but we are busy continuing to build and add to our experiences that we have a difficult time inundating ourselves in the next wave of whatever is next until we're in it, as we are now. This is to no fault of anyone as we're busy doing that life thing.

So this is where I return back the picture and how I associated it with the impact that AI is having. In a study published by the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at 美国罗格斯新泽西州立大学新布朗斯维克分校 , 70% of domestic workers say they were very or somewhat concerned about employers using AI in human resources decision-making and 30% were flat out concerned about their job being eliminated by AI. This is where the picture of the bricks comes into play. We're human. We are conditioned to worry. We have spent years investing time and money in an education system achieving degrees, developing skills in the workplace, or attaining certifications in various specialties. As much time as we've spent investing and developing our professional identities, the sensory overload of AI everything in our faces makes it feel like what has taken many of years to build it is being threatened, literally threatening each and every one of our professional lives in the immediate. It feels like as decision makers continue to investigate how AI can best serve the organization, people within the organization are already in the camp that investing in AI actually means elimination by AI of their jobs at any second.

What's extenuating this issue is the added perception in the lack of trust in upper management. Gallup published results in April of 2023 that indicated only 21% of domestic employees have a strong trust in leadership in the workplace. That's 70% of employees who feel of the foundation of them giving their all to an organization is not rooted on solid grounds. That's a recipe for disaster when you mix 1/3 fear of losing one's job, 1/3 feeling you can't keep up with times, and 1/3 cup of mistrust in leadership.

That's where I think organizations, leaders, and employees alike are looking at AI wrong. Breathe. Relax. Slow Down. As an employee, your experience and skills are not crumbling right before your eyes. They're not obsolete at this very second. The speed at which your skills need to change may be speeding up, but they're still going to be gradual in the grand scheme of things. You may be concerned that it took you a certain amount of time to learn a skill, but you need to look the time to learn something has greatly been reduced so your ability to get caught has been greatly reduced. A person doesn't need to simply rely on a text book or take an exam to be proficient in a topic anymore. You want to learn something, there are online books, online classes, online database, and yes, various apps, YouTube, and yes, even AI tools such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, or others to aid you in your re-skilling process. Taking it a step further, all of these organizations are investigating AI because most organizations not in a position to simply rip and replace everything they have invested in throughout the years so they, themselves need to take a methodical approach in how AI will impact their bottom lines.

I'm going to make the point about the financials by pulling straight from the 美国斯坦福大学 report. Building state-of-the-art AI systems increasingly requires large amounts of data, computer power, and money. Large language models are getting bigger and more expensive. For instance, ChatGPT-2, which was released in 2019, had 1.5 billion dataset parameters and cost an estimated $50,000 USD to train. Next up in 2022 was PaLM, containing 540 billion dataset parameters at a cost of $8 million USD. For those keeping count, that 360 times larger than GPT-2 and 160 times more expensive. Across the board, AI continues to compute more information with growing ongoing costs. Rip and replace doesn't make a for good business practices, but fits very well into an investment model. For the vendors inventing AI services, it will take time for full adoption because of the two aforementioned reasons in people and organizations. Keep developing, but develop with an eye on the long game. As employees, take the administrative work that you hate to do (who are we kidding, we all hate doing) and free up 20% or even 30% of your time to be more productive or apply to a new skill. For employers, encourage administrative automation and re-allocate your employees time to re-skilling and up-skilling.

But don't take it from me. Take from someone who is an actual subject matter expert in the field, Michael Chui, a partner in the McKinsey Global Institute . CNBC published an article citing the worry about A.I. making people's jobs obsolete, in which Mr. Chui gave a different position on AI supporting my perspective on its impact. Mr. Chui stated that “technology might automate a part of someone’s job, therefore augmenting their job" but "gives somebody superpowers". He gave an example that when leveraged properly, technology can write a first draft of a memo giving a person more time to do things than being bogged down with writing memos.

AI is meant to foster in a new wave of possibilities, but it's a wave. Just like a person standing on a beach. If you look out in the water and pause for a minute, you can see the wave forming. Even if the wave is getting bigger, we can see it forming. AI may be a tsunami of a change about to hit our shores, but you can see it coming as evidenced with it being in nearly every company's plan moving forward.You can't stop the wave from coming, but you have plenty of time to try on different wet suits, invest in a proper surf board, and get some lessons in surfing before the larger tides start making their way to shore. You might not be able to surf, but you have all the skills in the world to continue in building on the skills that you got to where you're at, and most definitely, where you're going.