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Use Your Imagination To Beat The AI Takeover
As we progress through school, university and into employment we are taught the apparent benefits of ever greater specialisation — adopting an ever narrower focus on what interests us (or more commonly pays the bills). Such an approach they say marks us out as an expert in our field, one that consumers and businesses will be willing to pay top dollar for long into the future.
The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and other technology as well as the rapidly changing nature of markets (both consumer and financial) suggest that this is now bad advice. Pippa Malmgren and Chris Lewis, writing in their recently published book, “Leadership Lab” rail against this move to ever greater specialisation:
The Western Reductionist model becomes more and more efficient until it reaches its ultimate incarnation — the algorithm. This serves only the most relevant information based on what you have already consumed. This means that our knowledge becomes deepened and exaggerated. At face value, this appears to be a great strength, but the opposite is true. By excluding all but the most obviously relevant information we exclude the ostensibly irrelevant. It is this that is most often the source of leadership vulnerability — the thing that no-one sees coming, because no-one imagined it.
