Developing Yourself in an AI World

Part-2

This is a follow-up article to my post entitled—Old-fashioned Moose

In that short article, I shared about the personal value I found in doing my own writing. A few days after writing it, I read this LinkedIn post by Gary Cohen—

Last week in the January edition of my monthly newsletter (https://lnkd.in/d5VxRSZf), one of the topics I mentioned was the various challenges we as a society have to deal with as #AI technology plays a bigger role in our daily activities and interactions.

One of the issues I cited is that if AI allows organizations to stop hiring junior level people, we will have to contend with a lack of senior level people in the future because we won't have developed any new senior level people. #orgdesign

Today, I saw a comment (https://lnkd.in/dAN58NzT) from a LinkedIn post on Anthropic requesting job applicants not to use #GenAI during the application process (https://lnkd.in/d2V84ba8) that brought up an even thornier and scarier problem.

Bina K. (https://lnkd.in/ebAV5BbE) the comment author, talks about the impact of AI technology on the development of our brains from a #neuroplasticity perspective. Essentially, if we stop developing our own capabilities to think about certain things, our brain will lose the ability to develop neural pathways that promote this kind of thinking. While the introduction of the calculator may have caused many of us to not develop the ability to do long division, GenAI is much more expansive in its reach and therefore the loss of neural pathway development might be more significant.

No easy answers, and I'm not suggesting not to use AI technology. However, we do have to think critically and holistically about the effects of the technology along with any compensatory activities we need to consider mitigating negative impact.

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My Reaction

I’m not an AI expert or a neuroscientist. I’m simply suggesting that while you fervently look to leverage AI in whatever your professional role is, you don’t forget one crucial element…

Developing Yourself

The depth and breadth of your skills, experience, ideas, growth, successes and failures. In other words, continue to invest in your learning. No matter how tedious or costly it is. You are the single investment you’ll be stuck with for the rest of your life. So, invest extensively, heartily, and wisely.

Stay agile and Human, my friends,

Bob.