Late last month I travelled to Queenstown, New Zealand, to deliver a speech to a group of property managers and investors on the topic of technology-driven change and the choices we face (thanks to Dinesh Pillutla and the team at Core Property Research for inviting me to speak).

It was an interesting experience, not only for the chance to delve into an industry that is itself undergoing significant change, but also because the speech that I gave wasn’t the one that I had first set out to deliver.

Having spent more than 20 years swept up the rapid changes of the technology sector, it is easy to forget that people outside the sector have a very different perspective on the role of technology, and a different appreciation for what it can and can’t do. As a speaker, this makes it all too easy to bamboozle an audience with demonstrations and prognostications of the technological utopia/apocalypse ahead – which might be entertaining (or unsettling) in the moment, but which holds little value over the long term.

This time I set out to take a different approach. My main thesis was that while technology is evolving quickly, we are putting our focus on the wrong things, in that we are focusing too much on technology and what it can do, not enough on what we want it to do.

In short, we need to stop thinking so much about technology, and start thinking a lot more about ourselves.

So when it came time to talk about AI, I choose to talk about something that technologists rarely talk about – human intelligence – and the skills and abilities that we already possess (and should be thinking about more) when it comes to understanding our role in a future world where AI is a major factor.

Why? Because getting from the first Australian computer (CSIRAC, built in 1949) to today’s AI took less than 75 years. We have gone from basic machines to a simulacra of intelligence in the blink of an eye. Evolutionary biology took approximately 750 million years to complete the same task.

It’s an impressive achievement, and not something we’ve needed to be overly concerned about – until now. Throughout history the development of technology has mostly been in support of human endeavour, and has tended to create more opportunities that it has erased. Now we may have reached a point where instead of supporting us, technology is competing with us (or more precisely, we are competing with it), and given its rapid evolution, we will fall behind quickly.

This is something we have seen time and time again throughout history – especially in sectors such as manufacturing – but now the emergence of more capable AI systems means that field of competition has broadened considerably. The most common question I get asked in any conversation about AI is ‘will AI take my job’. And the answer I give is most often ‘yes’ – it’s just a question of when.

At some point many of the jobs we do today won’t exist, but the expectation (still – and far from proven) is that more new ones will be created. The key for us as individuals is to anticipate which roles AI will perform better than us – and by when – and then work out what we need to do to ensure we stay relevant in that AI-focused future.

Hence the need to think more about human intelligence.

So in my presentation in Queenstown I posed the question of whether my audience would find their jobs replaced by AI, and then answered with a provisional ‘yes’ – that being if:

• You had lost your sense of curiosity.
• You were unable to listen and learn from diverse perspectives.
• You cannot elevate yourself out of your immediate environs to see the bigger picture.
• You lack empathy.
• You are unable to align to others.
• You cannot communicate.
• You have stopped learning.
• You are not adaptable.

If those traits describe you, then there is a very good chance that you will find your job replaced by AI. But it only takes the exercising of a few of those skills to provide a foundational capability that will help you maintain or grow your value in the turbulent years that lie ahead.

In summary – we need to be worrying a lot more about the exercising of our own human intelligence than we are worrying about the artificial kind.

No one can predict the future. We can make inferences and predictions, and we can run the risk of being very, very wrong.

But even though we can’t predict the future, we can consciously change the future through the actions that we take today.

And that is a capability that no machine can match (at least not yet).

ENDS