As business coaches, VIM Executive Coaching is not completely certain when the term Artificial Intelligence came out from behind its hidden corner and exploded on the modern scene. As a term and precept, AI has been around for many centuries. It has been a curiosity in our era certainly from the 1950s and on.
A day does not go by when executive leaders of note do not hesitate to extoll the virtues of artificial intelligence. In their view, it can or certainly will solve all of our problems. It will write plays and novels, paint amazing paintings, compose music, predict the weather, invent products, solve medical mysteries and find the very keys to life itself. Just listen, and they will assure us it is so.
The emotional giveaway
Is AI on everyone’s lips because it is poised to solve so many problems? Or, do we feel so overwhelmed by our present-day problems that we are begging AI to solve them for us? The two questions are miles apart.
We well understand that many of those we coach live in a largely digitized, virtual world. Their greatest companions are rectangular devices and wearable, watch-like machinery that might be loaded every type of software known to human kind. There are also glasses that do more than see and many, seriously, have contemplated the near future where we will be injected and embedded with digital technologies.
However, there are inconvenient truths and it relates to “our present-day problems and begging AI to solve them for us.” Unfortunately, it is spilling over to executive leadership.
We have brought this issue up before in another context, but it bears repetition:
At no time in history, have loneliness, alienation and isolation been as prevalent as in this time. It is an important finding. By the way, this is not a VIM Executive Coaching finding; it has been widely discussed among psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers and educators. If all of the brilliant thinkers who are pushing AI and all of its ramifications are so in-love with the digital age, how then do they propose AI will solve it?
Not the same thing?
“Hold on,” AI proponents are saying, “we never said we could fix societal problems.” Ah, but you did – and you have. So, what middle ground can be attained?
The first agreement is that artificial intelligence is, well, artificial. It is limited by its artificiality. We have spoken to artists and writers on this topic; scientists too. What makes human intelligence so special are our unexpected leaps. We are bounded by nothing. AI can paint something in the style of Degas; but it was Degas who painted in his style.
AI may have “insights” based on what has been programmed into it, but AI is not inciteful. We are. We may create AI systems that are Freud-like but they are not Freud. We may AI write in the style of an Alice Walker, but we lack her insights and her sheer brilliance.
Now we come to the topic of executive leadership (did you think we forgot?). What makes outstanding executive leaders so outstanding is their mindfulness; their flexibility in the moment; their responsiveness to sudden up’s, downs and changes. There is brilliance in our mindful minds.
What often brings executive leadership and those they manage into choppy waters is an over-reliance on the predictable, staid and inflexible. It is a lonely, isolated and alienated way of dealing with problems and often a lonely, isolated and alienated way of being treated. It is, in essence, the worst of AI. Even within the latitude AI may be programmed to offer, it is still not capable of matching mindfulness.
The truly emotional giveaway of artificial intelligence is that it is artificial in its emotions. To someone needing the mindful support of a leader, perhaps that it the most tragic outcome of all.