Antonym: Five Existential Crises Edition
If AI seems overwhelming you're on the right path.
Dear Reader
I was in a swanky bar on Brighton seafront having a good chat about generative AI with a new client.
“Don’t you get scared?,” they asked.
“Yes”, I said. “I think that’s appropriate.”
There are good reasons to feel uneasy about some of AI's potential outcomes. There are no good reasons to turn away from it and wish it wasn’t happening.
Emotions come and you have to acknowledge them, let them run their course. Then start thinking about solutions.
Ethan Mollick’s new book Co-Intelligence: Living And Working With AI starts on a note of warning about the discomfort involved in understanding the AI revolution. “Three sleepless nights” is his rule. When you first get to grips with a Large Language Model (LLM) like ChatGPT 4, if you experience an existential crisis that’s a sign you’re getting it. What will this mean for society? My children’s careers? My job?
Last week, we ran a company day introducing generative AI tools to a firm of around 150 people. We ran sessions on the basics of how to write a structured prompt, analysing tasks they want to use AI for, and how to create a customised chatbot. Opening some doors to what’s possible.
I mentioned Mollick’s “existential crisis” line in my introduction, and the friendlier label “AI Vertigo” that Casey Newton talks about. By early afternoon we had five reported existential crises.
“I just had one,” said a senior manager at lunch, “Just before the break. I realised how much of what we do will change. I had to stop for a bit.”
Hopefully, they were less painful because they were able to label them, to understand what was happening to them and talk about it with colleagues and members of our team. If you’ve ever had a panic attack and not known what it was, it is terrifying and you think you might die. Once you’ve had them explained to you they are unpleasant but you can get through them faster and with less fuss. (Yes, I do speak from experience.)
We have to acknowledge and think about the human emotions that will be involved in coming to terms with this new technology, and the upheavals that will follow. There’s going to be a lot of feelings and a lot of coming to terms with big new ideas.
We’re going to need a bigger vision
If you can’t disagree with AI, we have to start thinking and talking about how we will deal with the period of change that is upon us. And data suggest that it really is upon us already. “AI won’t take your job but someone understands AI will,” is a useful, thought-provoking statement, but not necessarily true.
Susan Athey, who teaches The Economics of Technology at Stanford Graduate School of Business is just one of many in her field who single out creative and marketing jobs as being particularly vulnerable. On the Pivot podcast she said:
I mean, I think if your job is to create images and sell them or write ad copy or send repetitive emails to your customers and hand write them, that doesn't seem like that's going to last very long. Now, what takes its place may be managing systems that do those things or measuring systems that do those things, but there may be less of those jobs, the people who are in those jobs may be more productive.
Predictions like these are causing real anxiety and worry for people working in marketing. According to a Gartner survey in February almost 90% of marketers are worried about technology replacing their job.
But focusing on technology, on the idea of AI is not going to get us anywhere. We need to direct focus to those with the power: big tech firms, government and businesses.
The Environmental and Social Governance (ESG) framework needs to be applied to AI strategy as a matter of urgency in the corporate space. It’s likely that a huge amount of value is going to be created by AI, so what will be done with that value. Governments and corporations (especially Big Tech) need to start having practical answers and plans for easing the effects of turbulence. We will need social safety nets and education and retraining on a grand scale to adapt quickly. The austerity and economic shocks of the last 15 years mean that in many countries those are the very parts of our social fabric that have been worn most thin.
Be at the office mandates: A signal and an accelerator of bad management
Insisting on people being in an office all of the time has always looked like a suspicious management tenet to me. If a manager is obsessed with people showing up in a location, it suggests that they aren’t measuring anything more useful, but also that they don’t trust their colleagues. Low trust and imprecise systems sound like a recipe for underperformance, and it turns out that’s exactly the case according to a study by the Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh.
Key findings:
RTO mandates often coincide with poor company performance, potentially serving as a scapegoat for underlying issues rather than addressing the root causes.
Companies with older male CEOs are more likely to implement RTO mandates, suggesting a potential generational or gender bias in the decision-making process.
Employee sentiment and perception of managerial ability decline following RTO mandates, indicating a negative impact on morale and trust in leadership.
Stock returns and performance remain flat after RTO mandates, suggesting that the policy change does not necessarily lead to improved business outcomes.
Leading the charge of the clueless with mandatory “get back to your desk” orders are companies Elon Musk’s Tesla (of course), detachable door aviation pioneers Boeing, ad giant Publicis Groupe, and Goldman Sachs.
Recommendations this week
Listening…
The Rest Is History podcast series on Martin Luther: Five episodes of a history podcast about the Reformation might not sound like a tantalising proposition, but it is absolutely fascinating. Dominic and Tom Holland do an amazing job of showing the very real parallels between the break from Rome of the Northern countries in Europe and today’s culture wars. People’s minds were being remade by big ideas circulated by an incredible new information technology and questioning things that had seemed like unshakeable truths just a few years before. Sounds very familiar.
Reading…
Doppelganger, by Naomi Klein: Is a super-smart and surprisingly gripping exploration of political polarisation and identity confusion, using Klein's frequently being mixed up with feminist-turned-conspiracist Naomi Wolf. This is personal and global in its perspective for Klein and she succeeds in making the most important questions of our age clearer. I struggle to sell the concept of the book, and I’m still reading it, but I’ve already bought it as a gift for others and find myself constantly bringing up ideas and examples from it in conversation. This is a garbled recommendation, but if you are even slightly curious I urge you to dive in.
The Future is Digital, by George Rzevski: A quarter of the length of Doppelganger, but maybe ten times as dense with answers about the shift from an industrial age to a digital age that began in the the 1990s and which we are, according to Rzevski, just about reaching the midpoint. Explaining the meaning of Stephen Hawking’s assertion that we are living in “the century of complexity” and generative AI’s role in the last phase of acceleration, this book puts the overwhelm and confusion of the times we are living through into a context that is energising and, in a way, reassuring.
Watching…
This Town (BBC iPlayer): Coventry in the early eighties. Grim and beautiful. Ska, the IRA, riots and urban decay. Original, gripping and without so many clichés that might have crept into a story like this.
Shogun (Disney): Stunning production values, writing and a gripping story. I almost forgot the weekly episode release schedule.
Three Body (Netflix): Hard sci-fi softened for your viewing pleasure. Relentless big idea punches.
Buy more books
In an advice piece for second-hand book shopping in the Washington Post, Michael Dirda includes tips like start with the Sale shelf and “bring a torch”, but finishes with a flourish that both validates my inability to not buy more books with a moral call-to-arms:
Try never to leave a bookstore without making a purchase, if only a used paperback. It is the least you can do to support these defenders and bastions of civilization.
On that note, may your existential crises be brief and your week full of possibility.
Thank you for reading,
Antony