Voters need to be skilled on AI
As we continue our assessment of the influence that artificial intelligence (AI) will have on our conflicts, we notice that in the areas of geopolitics and even our national politics we will have to ensure that, as voters, we have a sufficient knowledge of practical issues such as the impact of AI on employment, our international relationships, surveillance policies, service delivery and so on for us to elect the politicians most skilled in this knowledge, and how to apply it effectively to our benefit.
In the workplace we will need to compare our specific skillset and training with what AI is offering, and we need to ensure that we are timeously skilled, or reskilled, in what such developments will bring to our specific industry or workplace.
Here, a practical conflict strategy is to remember that much of AI in the workplace will, at least for a few years, be most efficiently run by workplaces that learn how to adapt their workforce to work with AI, and not against or without it.
The current quip is that you do not run the risk of losing your job to AI, but to people in your industry who work with AI.
This requires an industry specific urgent study of what is going on in your specific line of work, and an accurate assessment of where that industry will be 6-12 months from now, and then getting yourself prepared for that.
In interpersonal conflicts we will also see tremendous changes, with much of what gave people their sense of being grounded changing shape, of apparent political and economic realities changing shape, of multistate (or no state) corporations and governments invading our privacy and rights in ways hitherto unimaginable in the West.
We will see clashes of values and clashes of interest, we will be involved in vast changes such as none of us have lived through before.
Our income, our sense of self and value, even what it is to be human, will also need to be assessed in the coming months and years.
This can all be tremendously positive, and the solutions to some of our current apparently intractable conflicts. Much remains to be done and seen.
The one thing that we can do, in the midst of all this uncertainty, is to prepare our conflict competency for what lies ahead. That remains in our hands.
● Contact Andre Vlok at andre@conflictresolution centre.co.za