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Contributor: Thom Dennis - Serenity In Leadership | Published: 24 July 2023

Thom Dennis - Serenity In Leadership20 July 2023

AI is going to impact your life significantly and soon. ChatGPT is just one recent manifestation which has ignited a user take-up rate far exceeding expectations, with others in close pursuit.The World Economic Forumsays a quarter of jobs will be impacted over just the next five years as a result of technology and digitalisation.BT has unveiled its strategy to decrease its workforce by up to 55,000 employees by the year 2030, with roughly 10,000 positions being substituted by artificial intelligence. UK energy giantOctopus Energyreported that customer experience satisfaction is greater in those who have interacted with an AI-driven assistant (80% customer satisfaction) compared with human staff (65%). So where does this leave leaders and their teams?

What Are The Effects We Can Expect?The truth is at this early stage we can only guess what the actual effects and implications of AI will be, and how quickly things may change.We are going to live in an increasingly automated and influenced world, and AI will audit and improve productivity in probably all aspects of a business. The difficulty is that even its creators are unsure about what its capable of, how quickly that capability will develop, and what the impacts will be.

Leaders often take decisions without exploring the unintended consequences that are likely to ensue; with AI there are few precedents to work with to begin to understand the consequences. AI will often save us money and time, but the trouble is it is very crude and is a runaway train, and runaway trains tend to crash. So should we be excited or anxious about it, or are we always alarmed by the new? Wherever AI is going to take us, as humans we must maintain an extremely high level of vigilance and also a real sense of our own autonomy.

The Potential Benefits Associated With AIApart from increasing the profit and bottom line, AI will help in countless ways from aiding recruitment and addressing employment shortages and skills gaps to making more time for creativity and big thinking. AI is sure to improve efficiency and effectiveness by helping streamline workflow, automating time-consuming tasks and enhancing customer experience. Processes can be super-organised, and AI will improve accuracy and minimise human error as long as it is fully and accurately programmed. There are excellent opportunities for instance in the health field with the potential for AI to examine and diagnose increasing numbers of diseases better than a team of humans.

Key Problems Associated With AIThere isnt enough control.There were three boundaries that experts called out for at the earliest stages: dont put AI on the open Internet until you solve the control problem, dont teach AI to code because that makes it self-designing without inherent control, and dont have other AIs prompting it, and as entrepreneur and writer Mo Gawdat has reflected, we have crossed all three. The only way to defend against a super-intelligence is with another super intelligence so we are in a situation of runaway competition and Governments that are slow to act and far from ready. ChatGPT is based on reinforcement learning if you get an answer that is wrong you can ask it to think again, so one of the implications is that it will learn ethics and morality as it develops according to how we interact. It is not only well-intentioned people looking for an advantage in the use of this technology. AI is already seen to reflect unconscious as well as conscious biases and the influence can be subtle and pernicious.

Security and privacy concerns.From AIs ability to make decisions to handling personal data and the potential risks of cyber-attacks and data breaches, it is difficult but crucial for us to collaborate across countries to comprehend these risks and take necessary measures to minimise them. The precedent has been achieved in the case of human cloning, which is an active area of research today but is not in medical practice anywhere in the world.

Job losses. Goldman Sachs estimates thatas many as 300 million full-time jobsglobally could be automated in some way by the newest wave of AI. Many of these job losses, but not all, will likely affect the roles of lower-income employees and minorities meaning further exclusion or discrimination for these staff and a potential greater separation of groups of people when so much effort is going into increased inclusion.

Misinformation and fake news. Any inaccuracy or sloppiness in the phrasing of prompts will likely result in unexpected, misleading and often unwelcome, results.Vuelio and Daneburysresearch showed that two-thirds (67%) of polled business decision-makers worry about their company falling victim to fake news/misinformation and there is a danger of ruining reputations with 77% believing fake news/misinformation would cause their company reputational damage.

Losing our sense of being human. We already suffer from not being truly seen as we are, with social media only presenting very limited facets, working from home. This suggests a possible lack of work connection and being habitually time-short resulting in loss of social connection and empathy, and increased isolation.

How can we stay human whilst using AI?

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The pros and cons of AI and how we must stay Human | theHRD - The HR Director Magazine