Kerry Washington, AI Superhero

It's a Sunday evening in November, and I sit in a Lake Nona ballroom waiting for Techonomy to kick off. Beyond the conference's theme, "The Promise and Peril of AI," I have little idea what to expect.

The commercial version of Chat GPT won't celebrate its first birthday for a few more weeks and Sam Altman has not been ousted and re-inserted during a Succession-meets-Silicon-Valley four days. Still, the AI topic has been screaming toward the top of the hype cycle. Billions of VC dollars have been invested, and tools like Chat GPT, Claude, Llama, and Grok have become household names.

Microsoft and Google are racing to embed AI into their productivity suites, and everyone's wondering how Apple will enter the fray. The doomers pull existential-risk alarms while the techno-optimists push us to accelerate into a post-scarcity world.

In the conference's opening session, Josh Kampel , CEO of Worth Media Group , interviews Arati Prabhakar , who leads many of President Biden's AI efforts. If your impression of the government's technology literacy has been shaped by Orin Hatch asking Mark Zuckerberg how Facebook can survive not charging for its product, you would be pleasantly surprised. Prabhakar is sharp and thoughtful. She gives the room confidence that maybe the government understands the needle they have to thread. People give Biden's recent Executive Order decent marks.

Q&A follows. The tone is generally optimistic with questions and comments showcasing much of the promise of AI. It has the potential to transform healthcare, eliminating bureaucracy and super-charging medical devices, freeing health care professionals to practice more direct patient care. It can create abundance in agriculture, accelerate space exploration, expand access to therapy, and solve our energy crisis. On the peril side, we'll need to focus on bias, and we need to recognize the risks of applying algorithms at scale. There's much work to do, but I take heart that there are smart people coming together to do the work, something I feared was not happening earlier in the year.

This conference promises to be pragmatic. There's little talk of the existential risks that have dominated the news cycle. Everyone there seems to be "leaning in," a phrase that will be repeated several times during the next 48 hours.

And then someone asks about jobs. The record scratches and the music stops.

No longer does the room wonder how we can best harness the power of AI. No. Now AI has agency. It's coming for our jobs. Our kids' jobs. People become the object of sentences. We thought it would come for blue collar jobs, but white collar professions are in the crosshairs. AI has already transformed our news rooms. Entry-level writing gigs and editors have been decimated. What will it do next? How do we stop it before it strips us all of the dignity of earning a living?

I'm scheduled to participate on a panel on this very topic, and it becomes clear that what I've prepared doesn't match the tone of the questions. My fellow panelists ( Kim Sneeder ( CareerCircle ) and Tony O'Driscoll ( Duke University - The Fuqua School of Business ) and I spend 90 minutes after the session discussing possible angles. We decide to reconvene after a few morning sessions with the hope of building on other speakers' work.

None of us sleeps very well, as evidenced by the flurry of texts starting at 6:30 the next morning.

I sit down for the opening session, a discussion 1-800-Flowers.com CEO Jim McCann is hosting with an actress named Kerry Washington. People are excited. She starred in a show called Scandal as well as a number of big-time movies that I haven't seen. I'm indifferent. Maybe even a little negative.

Bringing in a celebrity feels like a good way to bring some attention to the conference, but I'm not expecting I'll come away with some new understanding of reinforcement learning or a human-centric change management framework. Many of the presenters have given their lives to the study of AI-- much more so than I have. They have chops. I imagine those who haven't watched Scandal share my low expectations, but what do I know?

Besides, I need to figure out what I'm going to say in a few hours. I plan to spend the session half-listening, while I jot down thoughts about possible question responses.

It takes Kerry Washington all of fifteen seconds to seize my attention and disabuse me of my notions. She speaks with depth and passion about the role of AI in the creative process. She understands the risks and explains what was at stake during the recent Screen Actor's Guild (SAG) strike. She (and others) deserves to know how studios and other people are using her image and likeness. She deserves the ability to grant or withhold permission, and she deserves to be compensated.

Washington talks thoughtfully about the peril of AI, and then she turns her attention to its promise. She and Dan Neely , founder of Vermillio , have mocked up an app that would allow someone to gift Washington's recent autobiography. After a few prompts, an AI-generated Kerry Washington would then deliver a personal message to the recipient. She talks about how she would transparently leverage the technology to scale her intimate connection with fans. It's vapor-ware, but proves an effective vehicle to showcase a possible future.

I look around. No one is glancing at their phone. They're sitting up straight. Listening with rapt attention. My notebook page reads, "Watch scandal" with an asterisk next to it. Under that, I've written "Kerry Washington 2024."

While the world is waiting for AI to do whatever it's going to do to the labor market, Kerry Washington is acting. She's acting in every sense. She has retained her agency. She is "leaning in" to both the promise and peril. Kerry Washington has a vision and she isn't operating out of fear.

This AI journey will take a lot of twists and turns. We can either be passive riders on this roller coaster, afraid that another shoe will drop, worried that our profession (which takes up too much of our identity) will soon be rendered obsolete, or we can channel our inner-Kerry Washington.

Yogi Berra once said, "Predictions are hard. Especially about the future." Yogi understood AI. No one really what's coming. But there's another quote that shows up in pitch decks the world over: "The best way to predict the future is to create it."*

The world of AI offers much promise, but only if we choose to seize it. It has the promise to turn us superhuman, leveraging a polymathic partner that can provide depth on almost any subject and can round out some of the skills we lack.

The comment-du-jour: "AI won't take your job. Someone who uses AI will." That's not true. Some jobs will go away. But AI has the promise to turn the least artistic of us into creatives and the least data-rational into statisticians. We can reinvent ourselves. Become more amazing. Enhance our humanness.

"We should not fear AI taking our jobs but instead, we should be excited about the new possibilities that will open up as humans and machines work together to solve the world's most pressing problems." - Fei-Fei Li, Computer Scientist, and Co-Director of Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI)

On a more global level, AI has the promise to radically transform the world of work. While we need safeguards against bias and Skynet and externalities we haven't even considered, we can and should imagine a world where people get out of bed every morning with spring in their step-- a sense of what the Japanese call Ikigai. Most people are just trading time for money, and that's borderline criminal. Work should not take our souls.

AI can help us cure cancer and can help us find cleaner sources of energy. Why can't it also help us to realize our potential and find purpose in what we do every day?

This world is possible if we choose to make it so. When it comes to AI and jobs, we cannot afford to be victims. We need to operate from a position of strength, not fear. We all need to be a little more like AI Superhero Kerry Washington.

Now give me a moment while I go binge-watch Scandal!

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* The quote is often misattributed to Abraham Lincoln. It likely comes from management theorist Peter Drucker or Dennis Gabor, a nobel-prize winning physicist.