The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing, to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts.
~John Keats
Last week, VIM Executive Coaching was sent one of those funny advertisements for a vacation spot. As we recall, it was Mona Lisa (her usual baffled look) wearing a bikini. She was on a striped lounge chair presumably overlooking the Mediterranean. Naturally, there was a nearby table with that appeared to be a Margarita, or at least some type of cocktail with a little paper umbrella.
It was a funny image, and we would suppose, another homage to AI. We suppose, that just about everything on and about the advertisement would have been maddening and mysterious to Leonardo da Vinci.
While the juxtaposition of Ms. Mona Lisa, the resort, the cocktail and bikini might have held some amusement, Leonardo would have eventually wondered who stole his image, who declared it their art? In fact, he might have questioned who changed the scale, who decided to dress “Mona” in such a gauche outfit, and even why someone plopped an umbrella-shaped object in a strange wine glass?
Relax, it’s a computer
The AI battle rages and we are clearly not going to pontificate on topics such as copyright, “fair use,” infringement or other weighty subjects. We will leave all of that to the legal community, labor unions (representing artists, actors and such) and to professors who speak on the arts. Instead, we will point out that at some point, computers with nearly infinite memory, computer software with specialized access to that memory and “technicians” able to adopt and then adapt the marriage of the two, quickly learned to co-op art, music, dance, literature, philosophy and other acts of creativity.
Many companies and technicians spend millions of dollars in advertising (with or without images as iconic as the Mona Lisa) convincing “us” that “we” no longer need personal investment or sweat equity in mundane creative tasks.
Unfortunately, the same artificial intelligence used to steal a movie scene and mold it to selling hot dogs or condo’s, is also drifting to executive leadership. Corporations have convinced executive leadership that all sorts of repetitive tasks can be managed through the use of co-opted responses.
We will concede
Of course, we will concede that certain tasks such as typical customer questions to boring numbers crunching, can be used instead of those traditionally forced into mind-numbing tasks.
The problem is a matter of “drift.” While the business world has been reassured that the tough decisions, the human decisions will remain the domain of executive leaders, AI will increasingly be used to “improve” decision making.
This leads us back to John Keats and his quote. Around 1800, Keats realized that it is truly better to not make up one’s mind beforehand. Indeed, business has endured centuries of bias because of executive leadership’s refusal to be mindful.
We have all seen and known executives who were set on a specific course, relying only on their judgment, seeing only their favoritism or predisposition. AI has the same, inherent danger of leading executives down a certain road with a certain algorithm at a certain instance. Sooner or later, it becomes no big deal to allow AI to grab an image or indeed, to hire only those who “think like us,” or to solve a problem “the way we want it solved.”
Are we anti-AI? No.
However, we are proponents of mindfulness and mindfulness training in executive leadership, and being open to change. Sometimes (usually), Mona Lisa is best left in the Louvre and not cut and pasted into an advertisement. Almost always, executive leaders should be mindful and not led down the road of bias.