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There’s a lot of fear around the explosion of AI and how it might take over our jobs. In fact, we feel AI is going to do quite the opposite. We have the opportunity for AI to take on the graft of human tasks to free us up to solve the bigger problems.

Umbar Shakir shares her thoughts on how AI isn’t going to replace humans (hint: it’s going to massively elevate human potential), freeing up human headspace for more meaningful and sustainable solutions, and how we can adapt and adopt this new wave of technology. Watch the video now or read the transcript below.

Video transcript

“A lot of my clients have been asking me about the ethics around AI and is this going to replace humans?

Because of the industrial age and manufacturing and factories, the Victorian era work ethic, we’ve maintained this production line view on how we do work. We’ve normalised tedium for humans.

This is a moment in time where we could really look at this technology that is getting closer and closer to what humans could do in terms of tasks and research and data gathering and data analytics. How should we be using those humans that work for us right now in better, bolder ways?

That’s the challenge that I kind of put to leadership teams and my clients to say, this technology could hack how we do work. So many of my clients are saying “there’s just too many problems to solve”, “we’re firefighting on so many fronts as a business”, “we’ve got all these goals around growth or cost optimization”, “I can’t deal with sustainability right now”.

I kind of liken it to craft and graft. There’s graft that we do to craft a solution. What if we used the technology to do the graft and free our headspace up to actually work on the craft?

And I think that’s where the power really comes in, in doing this in a more meaningful, responsible, ethical way. I really do think that next phase of what matters to humans is going to be about sustainability and how we minimise the damage that we do as humans to our planet.

And I fundamentally really do believe this is a game changing technology, generative AI and AI, to help us to be more human again.

We’ve seen waves of technology, the Internet, smartphones, cloud computing, et cetera, and there’s been a lot of hype around those in the past and not all of that materialised.

I think what we’ll do is we’ll adopt, we’ll adapt, and we’ll have different types of jobs in the future than we do today, and that’s no bad thing.”

Umbar Shakir

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