I was mid-walk, enjoying the weather and listening to YouTube videos from a woman I’d come really enjoy. As a presentation coach to working professionals, I often use my walks to catch up on YouTube content, searching for tips and techniques I can weave into my coaching sessions. Lately, I’d been watching a woman whose videos I found compelling. She was polished and a little exotic, which only added to her intrigue. Her exercises were smart and her insights sharp.
After watching a few videos, I thought, I wonder what her background is that makes her so effective. TV? Broadway?
I stopped walking to find the info I was looking for so I could mull over in my mind whatever I found about her, where she learned her craft, if she had courses or recommended books on public speaking, etc., but searched longer than expected and couldn’t find her. I was sent to a digital site that indicated the woman I was watching wasn’t real.
If I could have stopped in my tracks a second time I would have.
I kept looking. No name. No bio. No LinkedIn. No links to a real website. Just a landing page. No way to find her. No way to find a real person.
OMG – I have been learning from a computer-generated person?
AI. I felt sick to my stomach.
We see the impact on our family business with lightning speed. As adults, we understand at a deep level how this could upend entire career paths. Dreams of mastering a craft or a profession, but now what is needed from humans in those professions is questionable. So much for 10,000 hours spent mastering something.
I walked slowly at first. The weight of this unknown felt like weights around my ankles. I felt oddly desperate and hopeless. I started jogging, then running. I was running from something that scared me. What if AI becomes the doctor my daughter wants to be, what if AI becomes the Realtor, the artist, the soldier my kids want to be? What about me and my husband? What if it becomes the creator, the art director, the writer, the teacher we have spent our careers learning to perfect? How do we pay employees? How do our kids make money? Will they ever move out?!? Where do you run from this? Will no-named ladies teach my kids through a screen?
Everything I believe – that you are created to work and to reflect your creator in your work – was in question. Without work, without a passion, why exist? How do you raise children and grandchildren to want to be somebody someday if machines can do it better and faster?
I went deep. And I couldn’t escape the fact that I knew I wasn’t wrong. This thing is real. It will rob and steal. Sure, it will give us many new opportunities and it will take away many arduous jobs no one wants to do – I get that – but it has no boundaries and its creators dictate it keep creating new ways to be more “useful” to “help” us lowly humans.
My mind ended up in places I wasn’t expecting, and I didn’t want to be there.
I thought of a psalm I taught my children when they were young: “I look to the heavens from where my help comes from…”
Breathe. Look around at the beauty we live in.
I needed to switch gears. Where’s that hopeful Lisa? What would I tell my daughter if she came to me with these same fears? What advice would I give to someone else who might share these thoughts with me?
I forced my mind from this undefined black cloud of fears and get realistic. What can’t AI do and where does that lead?
AI can’t love you and it can’t love others. So, in theory, it can’t counsel, coach football, pat you on the back, relate to a broken heart, it can’t shake a hand and make someone feel welcome. It can’t inspire, hug, or hold a hand while someone is dying.
Okay, Lisa, tell me more.
It can’t fix the broken pipe under my house (yet), rescue a kitty from a tree, assess a mangled car accident victim at the scene or talk to the person’s family. It also can’t create ads that make you cry, it can’t go to a faraway country and negotiate with a madman to save a country, it can’t raise cattle, grow, harvest, and sell goods at a farmer’s market or coach someone through their private fears of public speaking.
I felt a little better having named job categories that can’t just evaporate into the proverbial hands of a computer. My running was less paced, less frantic.
With my mind a little more focused, I thought, I can’t be the only parent who has moments where they see their child’s future as bleak. I imagine every generation of change brought with it the unknown for future generations.
I usually favor humorous columns, light, life-encouraging. This time, though, I wanted other parents to know they aren’t alone in being overwhelmed by how AI is reshaping the workplace.
Where is the hope? I got it.
Let schools and higher ed teach hard skills to our kids. Let car rides, dinnertime conversations, church, and neighborhood get togethers model genuine communications skills. We want young adults who have the patience to sit with others, enjoy stories, share their own, and learn to identify and tend to the needs of others. We can’t let them off the hook in this area of personal development.
The phone is easy. It always gives kids what they want when they want it. But real-life conversations over a lifetime will develop powerful soft-skills that will save their future.
While we may not know exactly what real estate, construction, or marketing will look like in the future, we know there will always be a need for employees who are trustworthy, can shake a hand, look someone in the eye, and be part of closing a deal.
I headed home. I am still perplexed by the unknown woman – disturbed even. But I am walking again, uncertain, but less afraid. The future might be part machine, but I will run alongside my kids as they maneuver these uncharted territories.
When wearing her work hat, Lisa Mozloom is a media and presentation training coach and PR practitioner at The M Network, but at home she is a woman passionate about raising three teens and loving her husband.
(Lisa Mozloom)
Lisa Mozloom