It is always very stimulating to listen to Roberto who, with his unwavering enthusiasm, describes to me the advancement and development of technological wonders that I, from being authentic Boomer, I struggle to understand, often being content with a lacky intuition (but I try not to make them understand it!).
A few days ago we found ourselves discussing the new amazing App of Artificial Intelligence (Chat GPT) wondering - like everyone else in recent months - how much this innovation will change things: will we find ourselves useless humans, rendered powerless by software that can provide us with data and solutions in times and levels of complexity unimaginable for us? In other words, a little more dramatic and generic: will technological progress wipe us out? Or are we instead on the threshold of an extraordinary change that will allow us to achieve incredible results?
The discussion is old: the good Leopardi was already denouncing the illusion of”Magnificent and progressive fortunes” exalted by the Age of Enlightenment, concluding bitterly on the total insignificance of man and his illusions of progress, while shortly after Nietzsche impassionately invoked the death of God and the annexed advent of the Superman.
However, the news has stimulated Roberto and me (who tend to be more optimistic than Leopardi, but it doesn't take long) to reflect, much more prosaically, on what it can mean in a smart organization to be able to access AI solutions of this type.
Already with the advent of search engines on the Internet, we have become well aware that being in Tsunami of an informational 'bulimia' It's not that it really solved all problems: you need to know What to ask and it is necessary to understand, among the many information, What do we need to know. The availability/speed of information has certainly eliminated the need for many tasks with low added value (for example the time it took before to go to the library) but it has not at all reduced the need to make my brain work (some might argue that it has taken away the excuse of taking a walk in the sun to reach the library).
Now the amazing Chat GPT seems to take a further leap: not only does it find us information in a highly specific and “customized” way about our needs, but it reprocesses it in an extraordinary way, performing new things and solving problems. It is one thing to ask who Christopher Columbus was, and in a second dwarf to have the entire history of geographical discoveries available, it is another thing to ask to write a story of what Columbus would think if he suddenly found himself in America in the present time (this is not a random example: look on the Chat GPT website and the AI offers us a good story about it).
However, despite this' leap 'in knowledge rework information It is truly extraordinary to me that a scenario that has already been experienced is being repeated: technology allows us to systematize and automate a whole series of operations that used to occupy us even intensively and comes to do it even better than us, but every time this happens, additional spaces of complexity open up in which we are called to navigate.
Let's take the example of business management: they do a whole series of operations much better than us and are essential to govern processes whose complication would exceed our abilities. However, it is self-evident that a company has not solved its organizational problems by inserting a management system: our world is complex and uncomplicated, governed by uncertainty and unpredictability that people are called upon every day to interpret and govern through decisions with “limited rationality”. Perhaps a parallel with the functioning of our brain can help us: the latter, in the imperative of not wasting energy, once codified a series of behaviors authentically tries to 'put it away', depositing it in our routine unconscious. Classic example of driving a car: after some time we no longer think about accelerator/clutch/gear change synchronization because our brain has made it an unconscious routine. This allows us to take advantage of the time in the car to call our old friend or listen to the latest Maneskin song, or, if we want, fill that time with urgent and boring business calls... but this is our choice or, as some theologian would say, a matter of free will (a detail that I think Chat GPT does not have).
Incidentally: if you are objecting to me that you are forced to make boring business calls while driving, I would like to remind you of the walk in the sun in the library mentioned above: we can decide to do it anyway even if we no longer need the library... technological progress could force us to take responsibility for our choices (but this is another story and maybe we will learn more about it in a future article).
Back to us: if we trust this interpretive model, theAdvent of AI in our organizations it will stress the management already in place even more, that is, to have less and less need of good performers and scholars and more and more of people able to develop a very ancient capacity: that of Ask/ask yourself intelligent questions (incidentally: philosophy is the thing that believes that the question can sometimes be much more important than the answer), of intercepting critical information (for danger or opportunity) and of knowing how to do a “meta-reflection”, that is: not what I am doing but how I am doing what I am doing, rising higher and higher. I would like to say: it will force us to become more and more men, in the sense of a species different from all the others because it is equipped with reflectivity and creativity.
But Roberto was well convinced of these things before ChatGPT arrived, and if the bar of the challenge is raised now, welcome: In Cloudfire nobody likes to play easy!
PS: and now you might be wondering if this article is the answer to the question “Hey ChatGPT write me an article about yourself for the Cloudfire blog!”.
