The wheels of change are relentless, and — in the end — the successful are those behind the wheels driving them forward while everyone else is in front of them, adapting to their path.
As AI wipes jobs, Google CEO Sundar Pichai says it’s up to everyday people to adapt accordingly: ‘We will have to work through societal disruption’
I assume everyone is up to date with their understanding of what happened during the Industrial Revolution? I ask because that’s something we tend to celebrate, in spite of the enormous social and economic upheaval.
Without turning this into a historical excursion, the Industrial Revolution swept aside the cottage industries of cotton weavers, forcing most of them into cities to work on the machines that had replaced their labours. Then the disruption turned to agriculture.
You get the idea.
Is there a modern parallel? Yes, sort of, but it’s already happened, in that everything we’ve accomplished has been transformed into training data undergirding these artificial intelligences.
We’re the cotton weavers and the farmers in front of the colossal wheels of change, careful to avoid their vast shadows, awaiting their next turn.
How do we respond to this? No doubt, as predicted, some types of businesses won’t survive this cycle of change. Everyone else, much like those Octane has had as a client since 1999 stand a chance because — and this is the ironic part — while their uniqueness has given them a competitive advantage it was also the same thing that made it difficult to build a sustainable workflow.
Allow me to rephrase: It’s the human component of their businesses that could insulate them from the disruptive nature of this emerging AI revolution.
What I’ve learned from using AI here at Octane are these 3 simple rules:
- precision prompts;
- specificity of task(s);
- constant supervision.
Yes, the human component is what makes AI do amazing things.
I accept this could change, because that’s the nature of a revolution, and it’s up to us to be among those harnessing these wheels of change, but to also be mindful of those in front of them, and to not run them down in pursuit of progress and success.
Octane builds precision workflows for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), who are the
backbone of the economy, weighing in at 99.9% of all businesses.
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