I’ve written about tech trends on this blog a few times. Social Media, Bitcoin, even some early PLM related stuff for work before we went off and started our own blogs. The tech of the current moment is of course AI. I’ve got a lot to say about AI, so this may be a weird place to start, but I am just coming off of 3 days at our user conference interviewing customers about how they might use AI for software product discovery. As is usually the case when you actually take the time to talk to customers, I learned I few things I didn’t expect.
There is lots of talk about what it’s going to take to succeed in work world suffused with AI. A few themes seems to be consistent:
- People won’t get replaced by AI, rather they will get replaced by another person who knows how to use AI effectively.
- We all need to work on our “moats” – the things that humans can still (always?) do well that AI will never replace. Taste, judgment, intuition, invention.
- The people that will excel will have both domain expertise and AI prowess.
It’s that last point I’d like to examine a little more. I don’t think the claim is wrong – I think it’s just incomplete. The people that have domain expertise and solid / expanding AI skills will find themselves in potentially new territory: all of the “busy work” of their day to day will melt away. No more seeming busy responding to emails, going to meetings that don’t matter, searching for information in digital document piles. Well used, AI eliminates all of that busy work. So what’s left then?
Erich Fromm published Escape from Freedom in English in 1941. It’s a great read in general, especially to understand why our politics seems so broken, but one distinction he makes in that book is the difference between “freedom from” and “freedom to”. It seems human nature to seek “freedom from” – freedom from arbitrary rule, freedom from oppression, freedom from outside demands on your time or attention. It’s that teenage rebellious streak that stays with us all into adult hood – in usually more socially acceptable ways. However, those who have escaped all of those demands, find themselves in some new and scary territory. They now have the “freedom to” – freedom to pursue their own interests, freedom to live out their values, freedom to manifest some part of their inner world in the outer world. That sort of freedom can be terrifying. You have to know what your interests are. You have to be in touch with your values. You have to have interiority that you are brave enough to share with the world.
As Kierkegaard said “Anxiety is the dizziness of Freedom”. We all seem a little anxious these days. For those that find themselves of with domain expertise and solid AI skills, we best be prepared to feel a little dizzy.
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Side note: I am going to start using AI to help me write posts here. Over the life of this blog there have been lots of half done posts that never see the light of day since I get stuck trying to express myself. As I have tried to develop my own AI proficiency, one thing I have noticed is that it helps me “get off zero” – stop procrastinating and wordmsithing and just get started. Not everything here will be AI assisted – but when I do use it, I will always add the #madewithai tag. This one I wrote myself ;-).
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