AI following and leading

and the questions it raises

Once upon a time in 2019, before covid, before chat gpt… I wrote a post on Work 4.0. I wondered whether our fascination with IT in the fourth industrial revolution should be less about “everything is changing!” and more about trains…

Just like the steam trains of the industrial revolution, IT, AI, data analytics, and the internet of things facilitates the movement of goods and services (and ideas). It is also creating new industries and new jobs with many ways of working changing fast. The steam train likewise created middle class tourism and all the businesses that sprang up to support large numbers of sightseers and day-trippers. It prompted engineering advances. It changed what was seen as art and it largely replaced horses and carts. But I don’t however think anyone confused the trains with the goods and services they transmitted.

The focus on AI in a forum of business leaders I attended recently as well as news reports that thousands of books and academic articles have been pirated to train AI has prompted me to ask three big questions. How we can ensure that AI draws on quality, diverse knowledge while respecting creators and their intellectual property? How can we mitigate AI's energy and water greediness? How do we use AI as a tool - even a partner - so that we can be as human as possible?

I don’t have answers to those questions but I do think that as we engage with AI we will have to differentiate between the big promises of AI that it will change everything and its “toolness”. AI exists to help us do what we want. We need to be careful and wise about what we wish for.

I’ve also been thinking about followership and AI. Followership is the active contribution by followers to the leadership relationship and the leadership process. Behaviours unique to followership - what I call core followership behaviours - comprise deferring to the leader and supporting the leader to help achieve shared outcomes. In relation to AI there may be times when individuals follow, taking the AI partner’s lead. I see some similarities between followership of AI and of another human. Taking direction, accepting the leader’s decision, questioning for clarification and seeking guidance (all aspects of deferring) have parallels in a human/AI partnership. So do contributing to achieving goals and providing advice and feedback. But the supportive elements of building the relationship between leader and follower and enhancing the leader’s reputation are relational and less applicable to followership in an AI context.

I’d also suggest that the expectation that followership not be done blindly and the nuanced nature of followership which draws on followers’ broader understanding of the context within which they are working and the goals they are contributing to take on more importance in an AI partnership. Here- as in some human leadership relationships - the best enactment of followership might be not to follow.

Unlike human interactions AI workplace partnerships are uni-dimensional. The AI’s role is to be a tool that allows us to work faster and more efficiently. But speed and efficiency are not the only qualities I’d want to see in work. Relationships, creativity, humour, and beauty are also important. AI allows, even requires, us to work differently and is powerful. But to focus on this to the exclusion of other aspects of society slips into dystopia.

AI is valuable (and worthy of following) only if it helps us be more, and not less, human.