We have entered a new mental industrial shift: urgency as office culture. I'm talking to business leaders right now.
Globalism has changed mobile phones to not just be "accepted" as BYoD, but are now understood to be a 24x7 gateway to demand employee communication and response. Any hope of family / work balance is at risk.
Generative AI has been sold to us as "must have" worker efficiency, yet few have prioritized education and training -- or more importantly -- the value culture of our own humanity in an era of growing AI involvement (or dependence). AI is great at repetitive well documented processes, but is still terrible at work that requires genuine innovation and OOTB critical thinking. This results in a constant increase in fear and anxiety. Will I be replaced by AI ? What am I actually supposed to be doing that helps keep my workplace value ? These are company culture issues as well as personal skill development issues, wrapped in an existential mess.
“[AI] is still terrible at work that requires genuine innovation and OOTB critical thinking”
It doesn't help anybody when individuals with unreasonable power and money "tell us" how the world is changing, only for us to find out later that the promise has been empty, and we are just swallowing the hype because it is the loudest. Yes, there is tremendous value, but NO, it isn't as magical and prevalent as is claimed. It still takes hard work and skilled labor to get things running well.
It also doesn't help when we are getting increasingly addicted to doom-scrolling content that is overwhelmingly AI-generated, and crafted to feed our emotional addictions. This feeds addiction with content that just increases our anxiety, and makes us numb to figure out whether the content is real or fake. Try to figure out if certain promotions are actually scams! Then try explaining it to your parents and see if that doesn't cause confusion, anxiety, and fear.
The way out of this mess is honesty, accountability, governance, and vertical industry expertise, especially with change management for businesses. This wave of culture change causes people issues. While many in the tech sector think the answer is to replace people with AI agents, the real answer is about taking the extra time to learn how to skill up and empower your workers. This isn't a natural set of business skills we have been developing, so we are going to need to work on it. A good first step is to stop killing off AI ethics teams.
If you are a worker experiencing this AI overwhelm, check out my previous blog https://hackernoon.com/how-to-navigate-ai-overwhelm.
This article was lovingly written by a living, breathing, warm-blooded human. Yes, AI is used to fix typos and grammar mistakes, but all the ideas are organically sourced!