Episode #279: AI Armageddon

Software development went down two paths. One was as a means to better control the employees and the other was to empower them. China’s ubiquitous face recognition technology is way beyond anything predicted in George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984”. This is the software control function on steroids. On the other side, technology has freed up our time, has made complex processes incredibly fast and economical. The technology itself is just a tool, so managers need to make the decision to harness it as a shackle or as a springboard. AI will just take this whole decision making process further and faster.

We fear AI will take away jobs and that fear is predicated on our historical understanding of the advances in technology to date. Luddites saw their textile making craft decimated by steam powered machines. Horse drawn carriages were replaced by cars. Those carriage building craftsmen lost their jobs. Salespeople working for newspapers sold job ad space to companies and it was a river that flowed with gold. That employ is no more. Travel agencies were everywhere once upon a time, but not so much anymore, as we have all moved on line and we do the bookings ourselves.

There is a lot of hope and hype about the brave new world of the intelligent machine age. However, make no mistake amongst all these rosy predictions there will be substantial pain. Some jobs and skill sets will become totally marginalised. The idea that displaced workers will gracefully glide into another new line of tech created work is probably wishful thinking. Think of Tokyo taxi drivers, when autonomous driving eliminates their work. They won’t become programmers, coders or software engineers. They will be scrambling around for any work they can get, that doesn’t require any particularly developed skill base.

There will be winners and losers and for some of the latter painfully few choices. In every society, some just won’t make it. They won’t have the brainpower, education, experience, bankrolls or skills to make an easy transition and they will become victims of modernity, in the same way that there has always been victims with technology breakthroughs.

The good news is that it won’t happen overnight, so most of us can plan for a new work era. For example, if you are young and driving a taxi or a truck, now would be a good time to get out and re-skill. Yes, thanks to Amazon we have a temporary shortage of delivery drivers, but technology is not on your side and neither is time. They must either re-educate, reskill or face a very uncertain future. The winners won’t care much, as they just get on with their lives.

The task for managers is going to be how to make the technology a springboard to innovation, efficiency, prosperity and success. Idea generation will still be needed. Machines are good for structured problem solving and less good at unstructured problem solving. This is where we come into the picture, because we humans are good at the unstructured bit. We need to be really ramping up our problem solving teamwork skills.

The problem is that the managers are not good at this new area of demand. In fact, we need to get rid of managers altogether and replace them with leaders. Well what is the difference between what a manager does and what a leader does? Managers are there to manage processes and make sure the whole enterprise is humming along correctly, consistently, efficiently and smoothly. Leaders are there to do all of that too, and this is the important piece, to also build the people.

Japan has stopped building leaders for the last thirty years. Middle management has failed each generation since the Bubble Economy blew up in the late 1980s. When I got to Japan forty years ago, Japan’s management processes were a source of great interest to Western journalists and academics. This country had so many layers inside companies, it really stood out as an outlier.

One of the great advantages of lifetime employment and all of these multiple layers was that OJT or On The Job Training worked very, very well. This was a good model for building talent and experience inside companies. After the Bubble burst what did they cut? Training and marketing were put to the sword. OJT remained and over time it became the only substantial methodology for many firms to build their people.

The many layers were slimmed down or cut and so this collapsing of layers meant managers jobs got much bigger. They were also sideswiped by the introduction of keyboards for managers. With the advent of the internet and email, managers now did their own typing and secretaries were out, except for the very, very top people. Time poor managers just got more time poor.

The upshot of these changes was that coaching went right out the window compared to in the original OJT structure. Busy bosses just didn’t have the bandwidth to continue the old system. The new formula became cosmetic. The boss takes you along to a couple of client meetings and then you are basically on your own. This repeated cycle has been it in many companies for decades.

Times are changing, so the leaders need to relook at their own job specification. Machines will remove a lot of the grunt work, so leaders need to be doing more coaching, more team brainstorming, more innovation discovery, more experimenting than they are today. They should be looking at AI as a way to release their own time and their subordinate’s time, so they can do the things that only they can do. One of those things is building the people by coaching the next generation of leaders.

Soft skills will only increase in importance in a more intelligent machine dominated world. Our human interactions will become more focused on teamwork to solve unstructured problems in companies. Many will fall by the wayside and be forgotten. It will be a game of winners and losers and little in between. If you think you job is going to make you road kill to some robot, then now is the time to start to retooling your skill set. You have been warned Pilgrim.