We learn from our mistakes

Human intelligence vs AI: the balance in focusing on people and business

From the focus on people to sustainable business, here are some keys to facing the age of artificial intelligence

17 December 2024

Aggiungi Il Sole 24 Ore
ai preferiti su Google

3' min read

It has now been more than a year since ChatGPT hit the web. It was 30 November 2022, when we had a new tool in our hands. Since then, two factions have arisen that we can summarise as 'Yes AI' and 'No AI': on one side, in essence, those in favour of artificial intelligence, on the other side, those against. The truth, as always, lies not in a single dream, but in many dreams, in the words of Pier Paolo Pasolini.

We are in the era of neural networks based on self-attention

We are facing a technological renaissance. It was in 2017, when a Google document, entitled 'Attention is all you need', announced the arrival of the Transformer model, i.e., neural networks based on self-attention, capable of overcoming recurrent neural networks (or RNNs, an acronym for Recurrent Neural Network).

In the paper, which is still online and free to download, Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Lukasz Kaiser and Illia Polosukhin focused on the step change of the Transformer, which is able (as ChatGPT, an acronym for Generative, Pre-trained and Transformer, does today, like Bert or Vision Transformer) to weigh the importance of the different parts of a question (or input), considering their relationships.

From artificial intelligence to human intelligence

This excursus allows us to get to the topic of leadership, i.e. how to deal with the AIcene, the era in which artificial intelligence collaborates with human intelligence. If generative neural networks have made self-attention their strong point, the same must happen for managers called upon to lead the AI revolution.

Not a day goes by, in fact, when we do not read alarming news about the use of artificial intelligence: think of the applications in conflict with respect for human dignity, freedom and equality, as well as the fundamental rights of the European Union, from data protection to privacy and non-discrimination.

Another worrying issue, speaking of employment, is that of job losses: this is not new and - as the economist John Keynes taught in the 20th century - technological change can alter employability in the short term, offset by the emergence of new opportunities in the medium and long term.

What is needed, therefore, is the utmost attention of the leaders, who are able to assess the weaknesses and strengths of the revolution underway.

The true leader is the one with the growth mindset

As Satya Nadella, who became CEO after 22 years at Microsoft, explained, there are those people who have a 'growth mindset', i.e. a positive approach to challenges, and there are those who have a 'fixed mindset', i.e. who do not question themselves. The growth mindset - introduced by the leader of the US multinational company and inspired by the book 'Mindset: how you can fulfil your potential' by psychologist Carol Dweck - is what is needed for leaders in the age of artificial intelligence today.

The example brought in this regard by the CEO of Microsoft in Italy, Vincenzo Esposito, is that of the trumpeter Miles Davis: 'Jazz,' explained Esposito, 'is very similar to business, because those who practise it move on more or less fixed scores, in which they have patterns on which they play, moving according to how the audience behaves and how the other musicians react. I find this interplay very similar to business: just as in running a business you cannot have total improvisation, neither can you be too caged into certain patterns. The idea of respecting the harmony of what you are doing within a pattern is very powerful. What I've always liked about Miles Davis is his constant ability to reinvent himself: he was a pioneer in everything he did and he always changed what he did, never sitting down'.

The key lies in focusing on people and business

Let us try to sum up. At the heart of the current AIcene is attention: it applies to generative neural networks as well as to workers. The attention of leaders must be directed in at least two directions: people - inside and outside the company - and sustainable business for the environment, society and the economy. Dividing oneself between 'No AI' and 'Yes AI' diverts attention from the real goal of business, which is to create a better future than the present, which we have inherited.

* Senior Consultant at Newton SpA