As AI technology advances and becomes increasingly democratized, our fears are misplaced, should we fear intellectual atrophy over job loss?
While we hear about the many benefits of AI and the fear of job loss due to its remarkable ability to automate tasks, create content, and process information and insights at speeds never seen before, we may be fearing the wrong thing.
What sets humans apart is our cognitive abilities and ability to incorporate:
- Critical thinking
- Common sense
- Intuition
- Experience
All of these require practice and attention span, two traits that seem to be diminishing as we rely on the conveniences of digital devices, apps, and AI tools. The increasing accessibility of AI capabilities providing quick answers and solutions is leading to an over-reliance on technology, diminishing our ability to think critically and independently. Additionally, there’s an expectation amongst the leaders of the future on the reliance of these AI benefits. Gartner anticipates 75% of enterprises will operationalize AI by 2024 demonstrating the urgency of adopting and integrating these technologies. Deloitte reports a 68% skillset gap with AI talent, leading to companies investing in AI up-skilling as their number one priority.
The reports suggest the most coveted talent will be those who can design, build, deploy, and manage AI, and the ‘soft skills’ we most revere could be replaced with your ability to code or prompt. While many psychologists and leaders emphasize the importance of emotional intelligence in modern leadership, in the context of AI, the majority of the workforce is expected to up-skill their skill sets to align with AI instead. World Economic Forum predicts that AI and automation will create 97 million new jobs by 2025, but also displace 85 million jobs.
As such, we must strike a balance between technology and our cognitive strengths to mitigate the risk of intellectual atrophy with our children and workforce. To achieve this balance, let’s consider the following:
- Leaders should engage employees in critical thinking activities such as problem-solving workshops, brainstorming sessions, and open discussions where diverse perspectives are valued.
- Leaders should foster a growth mindset and encourage the younger workforce to view challenges as opportunities for cognitive growth versus an opportunity to rewrite lines of code.
- Deploy Human-AI collaboration to leverage the strengths of both humans and AI systems. Leaders might want to consider the importance of human characteristics that are not inherent to AI such as judgment, intuition, and creativity in decision-making processes, and incorporate it into end-of-year performance reviews.
- We should always ask the critical question of ‘WHY’ when assessing a solution or approach to a problem, to ensure it has been thoroughly thought through.
While there is no perfect solution, it’s clear we as a society have given up the ability to do basic mathematics on the fly or remember the phone numbers of friends because of the conveniences of technology. While we can’t stop, or slow down the democratization of AI, we must leverage AI to enhance, rather than diminish, our intellectual development.
More than ever, we need to develop our human brains to distinguish us from AI.
