Here's the Key to Success in the AI World

Take the first step...

Step 1

The AI world isn’t on its way; it’s been here for quite some time. But it’s quickly getting smarter, stronger, and increasingly present in our everyday lives. You may be able to lessen the impact of AI in some ways if you choose, but you can’t escape it. And you shouldn’t try. The trick is not to fight AI but to adapt to it.

Adapting to new technologies has always been the best way forward for societies and the individuals who make them up. But AI isn’t like any other technology. The nature of the transition that is required this time is unique and far more demanding. It requires an extremely focused and determined adaptive response from every one of us.

What should you do first?

The most important thing you can do now is reflect on the reality of AI’s likely impact on all aspects of your life. This is a time for great personal introspection and coming to grips with the reality of an AI dominant world. Reflect on your personal qualities and characteristics. Your social skills and deficiencies. Your personal and professional ambitions.

At the same time, take inventory of what you know about AI. How does it affect you now and how will it affect you in the future? How do you imagine your life going forward in an AI world?

The focus here today is on what you can do to succeed professionally in the AI world. In future posts you’ll see how the communications-based approach we take applies more broadly to your more personal and relational realities, too.

AI and Work

The most common, and perhaps most alarming prediction about AI’s impact on more developed societies, is that it will continue to eliminate lots of jobs but at a much faster rate. Even the most humanly optimistic forecasts recognize that a large percentage of jobs will be lost to automation.

The coming years could be disastrous for working people. After years of studying how AI development affects the labor market, University of Louisville professor Roman Yampolskiy, a leading international authority on AI safety, says that more than 90 percent of current human employment will disappear in the next five years! So-called “front line workers” (customer service agents, delivery people, fast food cooks, etc.) will find it almost impossible to keep their jobs.

Amazon recently cut 14,000 jobs, UPS cut 34,000, Nestle cut 16,00, and Accenture eliminated 11,000 jobs because of AI. In the wake of these cuts President and CEO of Microsoft AI Mustafa Suleyman referred to AI as a “labor reducing” and “labor replacing” technology. At the same time Suleyman’s boss, Bill Gates, admitted that humans aren’t going to be needed for a lot in the future.

How Can You Adapt Effectively?

Not dealing with the threat AI poses to your current job or imagined professional future is the worst thing you could do. The co-founder and CEO of the highly respected online news site Axios, Jim VandeHei, says, “If you close your eyes, you will not have a job…those who figure out how to use this technology I think will be fine. Those that don’t will be screwed.”

The way to adapt to the inevitable in VandeHei’s view is to figure out how to use AI as a force multiplier for whatever it is you’re doing or want to do in the workforce. Be creative and forward thinking. Think of AI as a resource, not a competitor.

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna has a more positive take on AI development and employment. He predicts IBM will hire more people out of college in the next 12 months than it has in the past few years. He says IBM and other high-tech companies will need employees with skills their clients feel really good about in the AI environment. So, what are those skills?

Krishna says they include people who are creative, innovative, and have the ability to communicate well with their colleagues in ways that can build trust will thrive in an AI dominated world. Even now Krishna does not allow people in company meetings of 10 people or less to be on their phones during the meetings. They have to be effective unmediated interpersonal communicators. He told CNN, “If they’re on their phones in a small group I tell them, ‘Why don’t you come back when you have time?’”

Social Communication Skills are Crucial

No matter what impact you believe AI is having now and will have on the workplace in the future, professional success going forward is going to depend on your ability to use technology well, but to be able to communicate effectively without machine intervention.

Those of us who nurture and develop our interpersonal communication skills will stand out in the workplace. We will focus more directly on those skills in other settings in future posts.

Core Integrity: Develop and Display Your Best Human Qualities

Social communication skills work best when the individual people who interact with each other in a work setting or anywhere else display human qualities that foster trust and cooperation. Remember, the first step in adapting successfully to the AI world is to honestly take stock of your personal qualities and characteristics. Then work consciously to improve them where needed.

We often hear the term “authenticity” mentioned as a favorable personal quality. Well, yes and no. You can be authentically wonderful or authentically awful. Your first step toward creating positive connections with other people should be to cultivate and display personal core integrity. That’s step one.

In future posts I will elaborate on how this crucial quality can be effectively communicated. In the end, everything ultimately hinges on how people perceive you in real unmediated time. So, for now, take an honest inventory of your personal qualities and characteristics and identify areas where you can improve. In a positive, healthy, enduring way, ask yourself how you can continue to build positive attributes of your personal core integrity.

AI developers are trying to make machines as “human like” as technically possible. Your challenge is to be as “human” as humanly possible.

Adapt to Survive and Thrive in any Environment…

The perspective presented on my Substack posts is based on my work about how communication drives the development of all organic life on Earth. Adaptation is central to progress throughout nature. I invite you take a look at my YouTube channel to learn more about how communication serves as the motor of human evolution.