AI is expanding in capability and pervasiveness at a rapid rate. This has led to an overwhelming fear from multiple sectors and skill sets that jobs will disappear, taken over by AI who can do the same task at scale and with efficiencies no human could ever match.
Given this rising fear you would expect humans to rally together and take on such a direct threat to their livelihood. Instead we find that corporate leaders do the opposite: they continue to treat their people with disdain, and not surprisingly we now have unprecedented and mass disengagement and distrust.
In addition, loneliness is at an all time high: people are struggling to connect; people find their lives have no meaning; they are living diminished lives, well below their capabilities and potential as humans.
In turn, this is exacerbating general fear levels and more people have a heightened level of anxiety about the future than ever before.
Here’s our modern day conundrum: we laud ourselves for being so smart for creating amazing technologies like AI, yet we have so much fear and anxiety about the changes it may bring to our lives and the lives of future generations ( loss of control, jobs and self).
In addition, instead of rallying and finding ways to strengthen ourselves against this coming AI onslaught we continue to diminish ourselves and prepare for our inevitable dominion. Our workplaces continue to suck out our humanity and replace our natural compassion and resilience with fear based incentives to achieve meaningless profit-related goals. We have disengaged in droves.
So what can business leaders and entrepreneurs do to ensure we remain relevant in a exponentially more technologically advanced world?
Entrepreneurs and business leaders need to transcend beyond their day to day activities and self-interests and guide their people to focus on the higher purpose of reinventing themselves and fiercely taking back our humanness; leaders need to create a practice that empowers them and their people to not only find their passion again, but also readies them for optimising their ability to add value in an AI-driven future.
It’s time we, as leaders, turned this tide, reinvented ourselves and fiercely took back our humanness.
It will take significant behaviour change; it will require us to step up into the higher, transcendent level of leadership, compassion and fearfulness required to grow our humanness and stand tall against the tide of technological change and corporate disengagement swirling around us.