Machines are getting smart. Very smart. As Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft has noted, we are now living in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. But right now, generative AI (GenAI) tools like ChatGPT are very primitive. Humans are still doing much of the work, conjuring up clever and efficient prompts to make machines ‘create’ things that may or may not be useful, and then carefully checking for hallucinations or stuff that has simply been made up.
If humanity ever creates artificial general intelligence (AGI), we are talking about another level of technology altogether: machines that actually think like we do, and probably way better than we do. Most experts think that true AGI is still some decades away. So, how can you best futureproof your career success in the current Age of GenAI?
1. Be clear on your ‘prime capabilities’
These are the key capabilities that enable an expert senior person in your field to add value for the people they work for, by best servicing their needs and solving their problems. Ask your clients, or the people you report to, what they most value about someone in your position. This will help with working out your prime capabilities. Consider Mary, who is a high-flying mergers and acquisitions lawyer, working in the in-house legal team of a major multinational corporation. After discussion with her colleagues and internal clients, Mary summarises her prime capabilities as being: legal knowledge, business acumen, negotiation skills and an ability to meet deadlines.
2. Assess your ‘enabiling capabilities’
Which will help you to deploy your prime capabilities. These will typically include things like emotional intelligence, relationships, critical thinking and communication skills. Mary assesses her enabling capabilities as including written and verbal communication skills, collaboration with colleagues, emotional intelligence, self-management, project management and a good understanding of the latest developments in relevant AI tools.
3. Identify ‘human tasks’
Being tasks that the people you work for value humans doing, perhaps with some ‘expert supervision’ of one or more AI tools or other machines as needed.Expert supervision means supervision requiring substantial human domain-specific knowledge, experience, expertise, judgement and wisdom. (By contrast, a‘machine task’ is one that the people you work forvalue machines doing rather than humans, perhaps with some routine non-expert supervision of a machine.) Mary’s main tasks involve applying her legal knowledge and business acumen to help her company negotiate and settle transactions in a timely manner. All of those tasks are human and not machine tasks. Her employer wants an expert lawyer like Mary to use and supervise AI tools.
4. Map your capabilities against human tasks
Do you have or are you developing the prime capabilities and enabling capabilities which will equip you to perform human tasks? Mary’s prime capabilities are well aligned with the tasks she is required to perform. Moreover, Mary is determined to work on her enabling capabilities and especially her communication skills and emotional intelligence. Since the arrival of GenAI, many commentators have noted that some AI tools can fake human traits like emotional intelligence, but for the foreseeable future humans hold the advantage over machines in such areas.
5. Keep up with AI tools in your field
You want to know how to best use and supervise AI tools which enable you to get human tasks done as efficiently as possible. Shortly after the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, a wide array of profession-specific GenAI tools started to hit the market. Clunky at first, these tools are getting better and more reliable at remarkable speed. Mary’s corporation invests in her by acquiring leading-edge AI legal tools and training Mary in their use on an ongoing basis as part of her career development.
Now, there may come a time in some AGI-enhanced Skynet-type future when Mary’s corporation might be happy to trust some AI tool to give it advice on a complicated cross border merger transaction without the tool being supervised by a lawyer. That world seems to still be many years away. In the meantime, corporations like Mary’s will expect their lawyers to use AI tools to increase productivity, but they will continue to value the knowledge, experience, expertise, judgement and wisdom that appropriately qualified and skilled humans bring to the table.
