Scenario #4: The Disruption of AI

As Carla and I wrote in the newsletter a few weeks ago, futurist thinking is work that is particularly well-suited to boards. It energizes trustees around interesting and important work. It helps get trustees out of the weeds and thinking at a strategic altitude. And it’s a powerful way to move into generative governance.

Over the course of the year, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about signals – specific events or artifacts that raise questions about, or suggest possibilities, for the future. Whereas trends are broad, signals have the texture and nuance of a specific story. For that reason, they’re often a more generative provocation for thinking about the future.

And from signals – or constellations of signals – we can develop scenarios. 

Futurists use scenarios to explore possibilities for the future. They are not trying to predict the future or even to come up with a foolproof plan for managing a future situation, but rather to develop cognitive flexibility by imagining what seems, today, to be implausible. Digging into a scenario also helps us to imagine what the future might look like if one of these scenarios should come to pass. It’s a microdose of futureshock that increases our insight – and reduces our response time – when the future actually comes. 

The scenario below is one we developed to use with a board that committed to a year of futurist thinking. It builds on a conversation people have been having about one signal that’s gotten a lot of attention: Chat GPT. It's not meant to be a prediction of the future or even a preferred future -- just a jumping off point for imagining the implications of one possible future.

This work helped their board shift the time horizon for strategic thinking – and think generatively about the questions they were wrestling with. It also emphasized one of the key implications of futurist thinking: a reminder that strategy is formulated in today’s world, but it should be designed for a world that could be very different. 

That context is intended to explain that this week’s scenario is a twofer: it’s both the fourth scenario we’ve shared this year, and an example of how you could use any scenario to ask better strategic questions.

Scenario: GPT AI OMG

August 2033. What started with ChatGPT has come a long way, and “generative AI” – meaning artificial intelligence that can generate novel content, rather than simply analyzing or acting on existing data, has come a long way. 

Students chat with their phones to organize schedules and produce first drafts of songs, presentations, essays, and other work. Generative AI creates advertisements, articles, legal documents, artwork, blueprints for buildings, computer code, and more.

The result has been a massive increase in economic productivity, coupled with mass unemployment. Many organizations have laid off the majority of their accountants, architects, attorneys, and computer programmers, as their work can be done with generative AI. Unemployment has reached 12-15%, and impacts the former middle and upper middle classes most dramatically. 

While generative AI is neutral as a tool, some people have found ways to use it for ill. Generative AI creates convincing video and recordings of things that have not happened, and these images and sounds are easily shared online to sway public opinion. The resulting disinformation can be used by governments to quash dissent, as well as by opposition groups to create unrest. 

Coupled with economic polarization, these forces have led to political polarization and instability around the globe. The economic middle class, and the political center, feels even thinner than ever. 

New opportunities, however, have been created. Experts in generative AI are needed to move that technology forward, as well as experts in the quantum computing that powers such massive calculations. While the numbers of people needed are not massive, these jobs are highly sought after and compensated. Still other jobs involve detecting misinformation and helping organizations sift through the massive amounts of data being produced to find meaning. This work often requires using generative AI to manage the output that generative AI has created. 

Generative AI has also led to massive advances in biotechnology, energy production, and large paradigm shifts in other fields. The technology has not advanced enough to work by itself – rather, opportunities exist for experts with enough content knowledge to comprehend what AI is suggesting and to lead the next round of work in the right direction. 

Other job opportunities exist for people with deeply human skills: writing an estate plan is easier than ever, but legal experts who can help families navigate grief, or grapple with the inevitability of their own mortality are in demand among the highly paid. Those with money in this new economy are willing to pay a premium for direct human experience.

The poor, however, learn online, or have their emotional needs met by generative AI – most health insurance, for instance, will only compensate for talk therapy delivered from a ChatBot. 

Strategic Discussion Questions

Here are some discussion questions that you might use to begin a strategic conversation in your community – but the array of potential questions are limitless!

Group 1: How should our school differentiate itself relative to the competition? What is our school’s value proposition?

• What will parents and students need from a school under this scenario? What will they stop looking for?

• What elements of our school’s current value proposition would become more valuable to parents and students? What elements of the current value proposition would become less valuable?

• What decisions could our school make today to outcompete other schools by 2033 under this scenario?

• Whether or not this specific scenario comes to pass, what questions should the board be asking about value proposition and differentiation?

Group 2: How should our school adapt to the changing landscape of college admissions?

• How would this scenario make college more – or less – important to families? What post-graduation pathways could become more important than they are today?

• How would this scenario impact the ability of our school to place students into highly selective post-graduation pathways (whether that’s college or something else?)

• What decisions could our school make today to outcompete other schools by 2033 under this scenario?

• Whether or not this specific scenario comes to pass, what questions should the board be asking about value proposition and differentiation?

Group 3: How should our school adapt to the changing work of work – and the changing landscape of professional opportunities?

• What jobs and other professional opportunities will become more promising for graduates under this scenario? What jobs or professional opportunities will become less promising?

• What knowledge, habits, and skills will become more important for graduates to possess in such a world? What knowledge, habits, and skills will become less important?

• What decisions could our school make today to outcompete other schools by 2033 under this scenario?

• Whether or not this specific scenario comes to pass, what questions should the board be asking about value proposition and differentiation?

If you are interested in bringing futurist thinking to your board or community, contact us at info@leadershipandesign.org.