Making Sense of Change

Photo by Levart_Photographer on Unsplash

The thing about transformative technologies is that they expose where value is - or isn’t - being generated. 

As a result, they accelerate the shift towards value ‘maximization’. In other words, those tasks that technology should deliver, it will, and those high value tasks that humans should focus on, they will. 

The problem is, though, that more often than not, it’s the humans who aren’t able to keep pace. 

Corporations will want to pick up and run with these new efficiencies and tools and it’s the folks who aren’t able to shift into new roles who get left behind (or left out). 

We can also look to our governments to help monitor these developments and set up retraining/reskilling programs, etc., but governments tend not to move at needed pace. 

So the lesson in all of this is simple. The responsibility has to remain with us, as individuals, in charge of our own careers. 

If we remove the idea of what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s appropriate and what’s fair, we need to look at our work and our roles in a more dynamic sense. 

We need to assess where the value lies in what we do. We need to objectively evaluate whether the work we do could be done quicker, cheaper or better elsewhere.

In the same vein, the question we should be answering is am I making a difference? Not based on the rules we’ve become accustomed to, but the rules of the future, the rules were moving towards. 

Reid Hoffman has suggested that tools like ChatGPT - which has the potential to be transformative in ways we’ve never seen before - will expose which parts of our work are low, medium and high value. And as a result, far from deterring the artist in us, it will allow for the true artists to rise. 

I believe that, and so should you. 

But it will all begin with us. Not the government, not our employer, not our community. 

With us.