Lions, Tigers & Scary AI – Oh My!

Evolving World of Work

The world of work is constantly evolving, and we are entering into another new phase, the AI Era.

This is not new; we’ve been evolving our work lives since the cavemen cooked their first fish over a fire! Humans have always focused on doing it better than before, and the biggest revolutions almost always came from life-changing discoveries or big government movements.

In the 1830s, Britain ruled the waves with the largest most powerful fleet of ships on the world. They also had the largest fleets of Slave ships. After decades of the horrible practice, the moral compass of the English people took over and a movement began to abolish it. But the business and finance leaders pushed back. They knew that slavery represented almost a third of the British economy and ending slavery many felt would also be the end of the Empire.

In the end, almost 30 years before the American Civil War, Britain did the right thing and outlawed slavery. All of the gnashing of teeth was for naught because entrepreneurs flooded into the void left by the slaves, unleashing the Industrial Revolution, the single greatest wealth generator and economic explosion in the history of the world.

Sixty years later another life-changing era took hold. Henry Ford began producing cars, and at first on average it took about 2-3 days to build one. When Ford launched his first assembly line each Model T took only an hour and tens of thousands of cars flooded the cities and countryside. What took twenty men to carry two tons about a mile, a Model T carry two tons for 20 miles on a few cups of gas, and one man behind the wheel? The whole world was turned upside down, with everyone from blacksmiths to buggy whip salesmen and everyone in between having to evolve and change the way they worked.

Did the world stop? Of course not, humans found how to adapt. Blacksmiths became auto mechanics, buggy whip salesmen became gas station attendants, and so on.

Take a look at other major events that changed us as a species, and we survived and made it past them and continued to prosper:

Discovery of gunpowder         The printing press

Steam Power                              End of Slavery

Telegraph                                    Electricity

Telephone                                   Combustion Engine

Radio                                           Airplanes

Penicillin                                    Space Travel

Television                                   Vaccines

Computers                                  Internet

Cellphones                                  Digital Voice Command

Artificial Intelligence                Mapping of the Human Genome

 

It will be the same with AI. The number of new opportunities and Uber-type innovations it spawns will be amazing. Take a page from history, put the worry beads away, and embrace the inevitable.

Change is hard, but before you know it the AI era will seem like it always existed. I try to always live in the future and build what’s missing, and personally can’t wait to see what comes next!