The age of AI has arrived into the mainstream.
Many of us would have read, heard and encountered news of how artificial intelligence and in the area of knowledge workers, language learning models or LLMs will one day eliminate more and more human jobs.
There is both a significant amount of fear, uncertainty and doubt as well as hope, optimism and opportunities for AI to help advance the human condition.
No matter what side of the AI fence you sit, whether you embrace it or fear it, AI is here to stay and evolve.
The reality is that like any advancement in technology it disrupts the status quo. There are winners as well as losers.
One example is how typewriters were replaced by computers and word processing software, and jobs such as typists disappeared over time as typing out our documents, correspondences and memos became more of a self-service function across all types of knowledge workers.
But did all typists go out of jobs? Not really, many of them pivoted into administrative roles where their already useful and functional keyboard skills could be translated into administrative roles where data entry was still a requirement. Even at the dawn of the Personal Computer revolution, before Optical Character Reading software and devices were powerful, there were still many handwritten documents that needed to be converted into machine readable text documents.
And so it is with AI and LLM. We have heard and encountered how students are one of the early adopters of LLMs in doing their project work and home work. Knowledge workers who need to write analysis, standard operating procedures or develop any business process can now make use of LLMs to rapidly iterate drafts into their work.
Even as the digital revolution in AI enables many areas of work, it cannot still replace the human touch in terms of “high touch” jobs like healthcare, elderly care, child care.
In fact, I would argue that because of digitalization and AI, the traditional analogue skills of inter-personal communication (face-to-face), emotional quotient and networking in person became even more valued assets.
As a continuing professional development trainer for leading professional institutes such as the Institute of Singapore Chartered Accountants, I have found that it is my experience and applied knowledge as a practitioner in statutory audit, internal audit, IT audit and security, cybersecurity and charity governance that helps me explain and illustrate the theory and knowledge that I teach in my courses.
For instance, instead of just sharing the theory of fraud risk, I can actually share my encounters in detecting real fraud cases involving people attempting to rig Government procurement processes through collusive bid-rigging behaviour.
I have been involved in IT security incidents as a former Chief Information Security Officer and also have overseen half a billion in investments for a public sector agency and went through real world experiences which one can only truly understand from actually going through the experiences in person.
Whether we embrace or reject AI and LLMs, they are here to stay.
What we can do is to develop digital skills to work with AI and concurrently build up our analogue assets to mitigate against the digitalization tsunami that will affect us all.