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I recently came across this amazing video of the DALL-E AI by OpenAI patching together historic paintings. The demonstration is quite simply breathtaking. For some though, that video will be absolutely terrifying. The traditional, contemporary idea is that robots will one day replace humans in work areas that require repetitive, predictable, and mundane tasks. I believe that the increased level of capability that AI continues to attain will go beyond reducing repetitive and redundant work; AI will probably be able to execute highly complex tasks in the future. With that said, I think the professional work of the future will require having a deep contextual understanding of information and environments in order to be able to guide AI to execute tasks that will have a meaningful impact on the world around us.

Let’s explore this together.

The level of detail that DALLE-E is able to execute, and the fact that it exhibits what could be seen as creativity, all while being able to give the user various options within seconds gives the impression that perhaps AI is not too far away from replacing humans in work tasks potentially too complex for us to even comprehend. OpenAI has already demonstrated AIs that can write articles, write code, and even make music. And here’s the thing, OpenAI is not the only company working on these kinds of projects; there are many companies that have gone public with their discoveries and maybe even more that are yet to go public.

So, that begs the question, where exactly will we fit in as humans? Will we eventually be completely sidelined? Will there be no work for humans? Will we eventually find ourselves reduced to the useless subjects of the capitalistic overlords that own the software running every single aspect of our planet?

If the above paragraph sounded scary, I meant to, but I don’t believe that will be the case. Humans will and always have had a role to play in this world. That role, however, has and is continuously evolving, but it will always be pivotal. So the real question in the emerging age of advanced AI, is what will that role be? What will be our actual work on earth?

Instead of humans fitting into this world, I believe we are actually building products that fit into ours; be it an ever-evolving world. The answer to where we fit in as humans in the future is in the prompts given to the DALL-E to generate the images it generates, as is with any other AI. The decisions that will be taken to give the AIs what they require to execute tasks will probably grow to be some of the most important work in the world.

This decision-making will probably require a deep understanding of the challenges we will look to solve, as well as a deep contextual understanding of impact analysis to evaluate the generated outputs. Simply put, we will have to know a lot about a lot in order to instruct AI to do what could seem like a little. We will no longer be measured on how much work we do, but rather on how impactful our work is. I believe that this will make work harder.

I’ve worked in some really cool places and not-so-cool places. I’ve been in teams where the level of quality output is simply incredible, and teams where the quality of output is less than desirable. I would say that most of these teams had an even distribution of talent, capability as well contextually relevant resources for them to do their jobs. The difference between these teams was always clear though: how optimistic and excited the team was to work with one another. Is this sense of optimism the key to a high-performing culture?

Let’s get into it.

Many people would argue that the key to a high-performance team is a mix of highly talented, skilled individuals coupled with the resources to enable them to do their jobs. Many would define this high performance as operational efficiency and high output. I’m not so sure about that.

Yes, operational efficiency and high output are great, but what if you are great at efficiently shipping bs? I think it’s possible to produce technically robust products with zero point one percent server downtime, and all sorts of bells and whistles but with an incredibly infuriating user experience.

I think high-performance teams are those that are able to efficiently produce high-quality products, both from a technical point of view and an experience point of view, and are adequately equipped to do so. Aside from the money, what sets a team apart seems to be the intangibles. The intangible energy in the team, the morale, the trust, the determination, and the optimism, are things we cannot touch and are not directly written into the job description.

To further emphasize this, why is it that you can find start-ups that do not have the resources to hire the “best” talent often able to get to market before large corporations? Is it that a bigger ship is harder to steer than a smaller ship? If that’s the case, what makes a ship a big one? Is it the number of people on board or is it the weight of the collective mentality on it? Startups often consist of individuals who believe and operate from a sense of unnatural optimism about the possibilities of their future. Google, Facebook, and Discovery (at a local level) are extremely large corporations. However, their ability to pivot and shift direction is well known. So it cannot just be the size, the culture clearly plays a major role in how the business grows.

This sense of optimism and positive energy created spaces where people worked with a sense of belief. In its absence, I would often find people working with a sense of fear of failure. People who are working from a position of fearing to fail because of the fear of the consequences that might follow are unlikely to take risks. As most know, advancements in the world require calculated risk-taking without fear of failure. Failure in an optimistic environment is an opportunity to learn instead of a punishable offense.

What is the level of morale in the team you are working in? Do the people on your team believe in the product they are working on? Do they operate from a position of belief and optimism, or do they operate from a position of fear? How does this affect the products you are working on?

What does it take to create an unnatural level of optimism in a team?

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