Patrick Dixon is a global keynote speaker on HR, workplace and AI, author 18 books

WHILE WORKPLACE WIPEOUTS from AI will be less dramatic than some fear, it is still true that in most industries the impact of AI at work will be profound, progressive, powerful. So what will all this mean for management and for leadership, for desk-based work?

AI will be revolutionary for all those who use computers every day. The greatest impact of AI will be to make lives easier for individual workers as they discover new tools. AI will remove day-today drudgery. 

Endless frustrations with badly designed software will (hopefully) disappear, and many people will find that they are able to do things that were almost impossible before. 

For example, creating a unique, high-definition AI photo for a marketing campaign, by typing in a phrase or two. Or designing a graph showing sales per product type, on Excel, just by speaking a brief instruction.

AI means more leadership and less management

For twenty years I have taught on many leadership programmes at business schools....

FOR TWO DECADES we heard apocalyptic warnings about ‘The End of Work’. The theme is always the same. A new industrial revolution will bring large-scale automation. As a result, most unskilled jobs won’t be needed, and most middle management will disappear, creating massive job losses.

Some have claimed that 80% of existing jobs will be destroyed by AI in a decade. One tech investor made headlines recently by predicting that 1 billion robots would be walking around our workplaces in twenty years.

Let me explain based on research in my new book on AI why I am certain that such forecasts for job destruction are complete nonsense, even taking a view as far ahead as 2060.

MOST OF TODAY’S AI is highly specialised and limited – for example facial recognition at passport control, or fraud detection for a credit card company. These systems are based on what we call Large Language Models, using pattern recognition. 

However, next generation Super-Smart AI will be broadly intelligent (some call this Artificial General Intelligence or AGI).

Super-Smart AI will be aware of context and able to understand, learn and apply knowledge across a wide range of tasks, solving problems in flexible and adaptable ways, acting autonomously like humans. 

Super-Smart AI will be able to do just about any task that a human can do – far beyond in many cases. But to achieve this, we need to learn from the human brain.

Patrick Dixon is a global AI keynote speaker, author of 18 books

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE will impact your life, family, friends, workplace and wider world, in ways that most people can hardly begin to imagine. AI has potential for enormous good, to transform our world for the better, but it also has the potential to cause great harm.

I have written many other books about trends, but writing this one has been a shocking and disturbing process, one which has raised many questions in my own mind about the future of humanity, in the context of other challenges such as war and our changing climate.

Plugging human brains into the digital universe

Here is just one example of a new development in AI with huge implications for society. A rapidly growing number of people say that they would like to plug their own brains directly into the digital universe sometime soon, which of course also means AI. And the technology is now available to begin to do just that. In the US, 5% of eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds ‘definitely would consider’ a wireless chip inserted into their own brains over the next twelve months, while 8% ‘probably would’. This means one in eight young adults in the US are seriously thinking about becoming digitally enhanced in some way...