Ola Elkhatib Teacher at NLCS Dubai

Why Shouldn’t People Worry about AI Taking Over?

In 2017, studies were wondering if educational institutes would be ready to replace educators with robots, in less than a decade! That would have been about three to four years from the date of writing this article in 2023 (Bodkin, 2017; Global Educational Series, 2017).

Although it seemed a bit extreme back then, researchers were able to bring up strong points to justify their robotic futuristic vision. Their justification hovered around robots’ efficient performance with less possibility of mistakes, in addition to the cost-effectiveness the replacement of teachers with robots would bring, with no sick leave or even paid holidays needed. Furthermore, it was argued that even teachers like robots and that they use technology in the classroom to enhance students’ learning (Bodkin, 2017; Global Educational Series, 2017).

No matter how powerful and convincing the idea of replacing humans with robots may or may have not seemed, the opponent was intense. Researchers expressed their worry about generations’ ability to succeed in the absence of the human element, using data from previous years’ meta-analysis studies. The data showed that over 62% of people who lose their jobs in the US lack communication skills (About.com, 2014, cited in Eisenhauer, 2015). They argued that human interaction and social influence are key to humans’ evolution and survival

(Bodkin, 2017; Global Educational Series, 2017).

Korteling’s et al. (2021, p.9) study revealed that “No matter how intelligent autonomous AI agents become in certain respects, at least for the foreseeable future, they will remain unconscious machines”.

How Will Workplaces Look in The Future?

This question brings the same takeaway from 2017, if survival and evolution happened with the involvement of human interaction and social influence, then history will be repeating itself. What many people seem to not get is that those elements of human interaction and social influence are the core of leadership (Bass, 1974, cited in Bass, 2009).

Camp (2022) argues that looking into companies’ or Organisations’ data from the past, analysing it, and responding to its interpretations with strategic plans, is so far from the reality of leadership. On the contrary, he considered this as management. Furthermore, he argued that true leaders are those who look through the future instead of the past.

In fact, the new version of GPT4, which will be launched before the end of March 2023, will be multimodal. This means that it will be able to interpret data from images as well as from texts and generate results in the form of texts, images, and videos. Furthermore, the language settings will be made multilingual, where the input and output data can be in different languages (Byrne, 2023).

Combining Camp’s (2022) view of management versus leadership, with Byrne’s (2023) GPT-4 scoop shows that management roles are soon to be held by AI, whereas Korteling et al. (2021) considered perceiving Artificial Intelligence as a fundamental component of the workplace in the future, suggesting that the collaboration will be the solution. In their collaboration vision, employees will not only collaborate with each other but also with AI.

What Do We Expect?

The upcoming era will bring many changes that we should be ready for. Below are some of these:

• More Powerful Employees

Buren &Greenwood (2008) emphasised that workplace policies must be reformed, acknowledging the imbalanced distribution of power between employers and employees. They also argued that employees’ voice is equally essential as employers’ voice, not only for their well-being and engagement but also for the business to success.

The focus will be on collaboration. When people collaborate, they equally share ideas and work on them. Those who find it hard to work with teams must enhance their social skills (Camp, 2022).

Butler, Tregaskis & Glover (2013) suggested a partnership model between employers and employees, where communication was not conducted through a hierarchical approach, but rather a matrix-based one, where management shared all work-related information, employees in return trusted them, and they all cooperated horizontally instead of vertically to make decisions. The results were positive in both areas, employee satisfaction, and business outcomes.

• The Coach Leader Leaders will have a well-being and mental health responsibility towards their employees (Morgan, 2023). If people were used to working alone regardless of how they feel, the collaboration will require a certain degree of psychological safety and well-being (Camp, 2022).

• The Accountable Employee Research has proven employees’ accountability to enhance their engagement, job satisfaction, performance, organisational citizenship behaviour, and organisational behaviour (Han & Perry, 2020).

Great performance will not be perceived as an end goal, but rather as life-long learning. Humans are too complex in comparison to AI, and they like to be held responsible and accountable. This means that leaders will eventually have to stop judging their employees’ performance. Alternatively, they will be expected to coach them and collaborate with them, to help them gain the necessary awareness and set their own actions, aiming toward continuous learning and improvement (William, 2023).

• From an employee to a business owner – Employee Shareholder Activism

Corporates in Germany have started to implement a business model, where employees and managers get a chance to become potential shareholders, aiming for distributional equity both financially and politically (van der Zwan, 2013). In the future, more corporations should embrace such initiatives on a global level.

How Do We Get There?

Perhaps you are now thinking of booking a meeting with your manager to ask for shared equity, hold on! The only way to make such changes happen is through one key, which the article started with and will end with, it is leadership. Leadership is influence, collaboration, attentive listening, asking powerful questions, and fairly distributed roles. Are you demonstrating these yet? Not too late to make improvements!