Playing With Fire

I read an article recently about how managers can use AI to be more effective and planned to offer a caveat about still being authentic in how you relate to people. Sound advice, because I recently worked with a manager who used AI to draft all her correspondence and found her written communication to be precise, sterile and unmotivating – completely the opposite of her usual engaging and thoughtful self. 

But I’m not going to write about that. I’m going to write about Bill Gates, AI, leaders, and you. 

There’s no denying that Gates has a complicated legacy – start with Wikipedia and go as deep as you’d like – but he was there at the dawn of the computer age and has forgotten, remembered, and forgotten more about technology than anything you and I can learn even with an excellent AI prompt. He just sounded a warning we all need to read and heed – The Turbulent AI Era Is Here. The Choices We Make Now Are Critical. 

Gates offers the typical risks you might have read about – jobs will disappear, bad actors and bad AI will do bad things, and negative effects on human relationships and child development. He also suggests a number of wonderful possibilities for clean energy, climate change, food security, healthcare, better government services, and more. It feels like a balanced look. 

But the most lasting impression is that disruption will happen quickly in nearly all the areas you care most deeply about and the “world needs a plan.” His message to leaders is: 

You have a chance to act now, before unemployment rises sharply, communities are hurting, and public trust has eroded. You can make sure that your government handles the problem holistically, rather than divvying it up into multiple bureaucratic fiefdoms. You can make sure AI benefits everyone. And you can work with other governments to meet this national and global challenge.

I’ve often told leaders that “you should never implement something more complex than you’re capable of managing” and yet we do it all the time. We’re a bad judge of just what our limits are though we always eventually find out. 

With AI, we don’t have a choice. We’d better seriously start wrapping our arms around it before we FAFO (“fool” around and find out). I’m tempering my hopes. I mean, I can’t even stop spam calls from coming in, for god’s sake, and you can’t stop reading Facebook or X even though they’ve been corrupting our elections for a decade. How can we expect the people who are making billions and trillions on AI to rein themselves in before it’s too late? 

Still, somebody has to take the lead. A lot of somebodies. A whole world of somebodies. It might as well start with you and me. Every other question we should be asking is: 

“How can we maximize the upside of Artificial Intelligence while minimizing the downside for our kids, our colleagues, and humanity?” 

If we don't, we're just playing with fire.