Valuable traits in an AI world

“Technology is a useful servant but a dangerous master.” - Christian Lous Lange

Each technological shift produces two predictable reactions. Fairy-tale forecasts and fear. The fairy-tale is that AI will do everything for us and when combined with robots will make humans able to enjoy leisure with a guaranteed income stream. The fear is for a world where we are physically and mentally redundant and we are so useless that we will be unable to find meaningful roles. I am going to walk you through where I land. The AI fairy-tale and fear-mongering is making it harder for people to decide on how they should up skill. If you, or a loved one is in that situation, this is for you.

The chequered history of forecasts

As Buffett famously said, "forecasts tell you more about the forecaster than they do about the future". The idea of technology leaving more time for leisure has been around for over 2000 years! Aristotle imagined a world where tools act by themselves, for example shuttles weaving on and lyres playing on their own. This reality has come and gone, but people still complain of being overworked! I'm not quite 2000 years old but am old enough to have seen a few hype forecasts come and go.

1. They were predicting the complete end of the need for paper in the 1990s with e-mails, PDFs and digital workflows. In practice “paper-light”, was probably more accurate and there is still a printer in offices and homes.

2. The Segway was launched in the early 2000s and was pitched as a device that would reshape cities and personal transport. Instead, it found narrow uses in tourism, security and warehouses.

3. MOOCs: Massive, open, online courses were meant to put traditional universities out of business. MOOCs ended up useful for lifelong learning and skills acquisition, but not as a wholesale replacement for campus-based higher education.

Add to that the Metaverse and blockchaining everything and whilst these technologies have important use cases, they did not have the impact or scope that was expected.

Where AI actually is changing the role of work

AI has actually changed the game in many generic skills. For coding, the ability to quickly generate and debug code has made huge productivity advances, which has then had a knock-on impact to software company valuations and the availability of coding jobs. In the investment business, many firms are reporting that AI advances is reducing their need for graduate hires. I personally see that as at best partly true, but there is no getting away from the fact that the resource cost of producing generic analysis and presentations has significantly decreased. AI customer support too is quickly becoming a default option for companies trying to reduce the cost and improve the data quality of dealing with everyday issues.

It's tough to decide whether these are very valuable tasks or not. When people need technology to stop them needing to check email or their whatsapp messages aren't we creating technology to protect us from other forms of technology?

Value-proof yourself in an AI world

We often forget how much the world can change. After the advent of mass farming, people went from being largely agricultural to living mostly in towns and cities. This shift made huge differences to lifestyles and which traits were valuable. How can we project forward what might emerge from this big shift? There will certainly be areas of values. Here are my top 5:

1. Judgment - if analysis is going to be plentiful, how will we weigh it up? Which criteria do we measure success by? Judgment generally occurs without all the required information, some of it might be rough or out of date. You also need to be able to consider competing priorities and consequences, then arrive at a conclusion. That is something which AI is just not ready for.

2. Critical thinking - As people increasingly delegate their "thinking" to AI, being able to challenge assumptions and spot weak logic is going to be ever more important. Are we justified in this starting point? why do we believe that to be true? Even if it's true why does that justify your inference?

3. Emotional intelligence - A future podcast interviewee on the CIO Chair (Podcasts | cio investment club) said without any hesitation that emotional intelligence is the most important skill to invest in. Most of our work and pleasure is with people and for people. Where people are concerned, they want to know that their priorities are being listened to and considered. You should want people to be comfortable around you, and that involves bringing positive energy and motivation to move forward. Emotional intelligence in electronic communication is a skill that could not be more important. How to use it and as importantly when not to use it, is such a gap.

4. Accountability - As a leader, we want to be able to delegate a whole project or task and just want the outcome rather than being continually drawn back into the process. Often imprecise scoping or unexpected problems will emerge along the way. If someone feels they can delegate to you because you will figure out how to solve the problems, that peace of mind is unbelievably powerful and valuable. A super-skill whatever the technological backdrop is someone who takes accountability seriously and just 'gets stuff done'.

5. Courage/Ethics - One of the most challenging parts of progress is when you know should actually say no to something. Courage, which I think of as the ability to act or speak up despite the discomfort and effort it requires is something which in all places at all times has value. I pair that rightly or wrongly with ethics, which is remembering that we uphold behaviour that defines our high standards and prioritises the long-term health of the business. AI cannot necessarily understand the context in which it is being used.

What does good use of AI look like?

1) Prompting and Editing: The speed of creating draft 1 is super quick, but it should not be an outsourcing of thinking. The structure of the work you are producing should be driven by you. Good prompting is followed by even better editing to get a strong message across in your authentic voice. It is such a giveaway when people under-edit AI-generated governance papers or Linkedin messages. As long as you are happy saying, I am just going through the motions it is fine, otherwise it reflects poorly on you.

2) Know what to do yourself: If you are trying to get Claude to do your business plan, I do not think that bodes well. A business is a highly subjective, multi-dimensional problem-solving exercise and that thinking is best done by you. High leverage decisions that involve your values, preferences and dreams need a lot of steering from you. The hard thinking

3) Experiment Safely: The fun of AI is that it is developing at such a fast rate. I think it's fair to say that new reasoning and agentic functions are coming out each day although the competition to be first out, means that quality or safety is sometimes compromised. This means that important tasks and especially important data should be kept away from it.

So what?

1. Each new technology triggers fantasy and fear. It's also not the first time that humans have fantasised about technology will free humans into a life of leisure.

2. We have heard before hockey-stick projections: paperless office, the Segway, MOOCs, the metaverse and blockchain. The technology use in the end had its limits.

3. Whilst coding, analysis, presentations and customer support has become easy to automate, judgment and critical thinking becomes an important element to making good decisions. AI should be informing not making decisions.

4. Given the world is working with and to serve people, emotional intelligence, accountability, courage and ethics because understanding context and follow-through is not something which you can outsource.

5. I think you are leaving a lot of value on the table if you do not try and use AI for what it is good for, but it is not a substitute for thinking, values or responsibility.

Next week, will be "How do CIOs create a high-performance investment environment". As always get the blog delivered directly to your inbox on Home | Deciders | for mental fitness | change your mind.