How will generative AI impact communities of practice?
Right – let’s do this. Today, we’re talking about AI and what I think it’s potential impact on the future of communities will be. Full disclosure - I am by no means an expert in either AI, communities or predicting the future so this will be largely guesswork, but I would like to think it’s at least reasonably informed guesswork.
By now you should have heard of Chat GPT, the most famous of a new wave of generative artificial intelligence tools. You ask it a question and it gives you an answer that it has created all by itself. You ask it to produce a piece of content, and within seconds it just does it (Chat GPT specialises in text, but there’s plenty of image and code producing tools out there too). Its properly clever. You’ll have seen in a past edition I wrote about 6 books that I think are about communities of practice, and when I asked Chat-GPT it gave me a very similar if not better answer, and it did it a lot quicker than I did! Generative AI offers the opportunity to shake up the tasks that are required to complete many roles and, somewhat hyperbolically, presents an existential threat to many jobs in the job market. There are already reports from some companies increasing their productivity expectations by fifty times or more, in the expectation that their staff will use generative AI to complete their tasks and why the hell should we pay them the same salary without increasing our expectations? Teachers are struggling to work out whether students are actually doing their coursework or just handing in a 10,000 word essay that was generated in minutes and then skim read for gibberish.
Let’s be real here – any technological advance will impact the job market. I don’t say that flippantly, I know that it’s peoples livelihoods we’re talking about. Generative AI will impact the job market in the same way the personal computer did, the electronic calculator did, the printing press did, the way the steam engine did. My background is in software testing, and we’ve spent the past ten years being told that software testing is dead, automated testing will make us all redundant, blah blah blah. We’re still here. As satisfying as the schadenfreude is from watching the pearl clutching at the suggestion that gen AI is going to replace programmers, they will also still be here in 10 years time. The tasks we may complete in order to be good at our jobs will change, but we’ll still be here. That’s my personal belief towards generative AI anyway – it’s going to prove to be a very useful tool in many different roles and industries, but it will remain a tool. If an AI can help a doctor diagnose illness to a higher degree of consistency and accuracy than they can alone, that is empirically better….but we still need the doctor. Look at the airline industry – we all know that the auto pilot is flying the plane for 95% of the flight, and we know it could land the plane if we really wanted it to, but we still have a pilot there to do it. I would also predict that those companies that are in the news for making whole departments redundant because they think they can rely exclusively on gen AI are going to be in for a very rude awakening.
This all brings us on the communities of practice. How is it going to effect us? I will warn you now, this is the point where we fly off into my opinion and vision of the future, so don’t mistake any of this for fact. Remember how your teacher told you that you needed to be able to show your working, you wont always have a calculator in your pocket? How we laugh, now we have access to literally every single thing ever written in our pocket at all times. In the very near future, we are going to be carrying around the means to CREATE anything in our pockets, and that is very different indeed. Suddenly I can approach tasks that I know nothing about and within a couple of well constructed questions I can be having a decent stab at completing it. Microsoft is naming its latest round of AI productivity tools ‘Co-pilot’ for a reason – they are positioning these tools as something you would use to support you in your tasks, not to replace you. As an advocate of strong style pairing for many years, we now find ourselves in a position where we have a capable and on-demand pairing partner with us at all times for any task we may be presented with. A coder who can write, debug and refactor code in seconds, a copywriter that can research and summarise a subject almost instantly, a designer that can create a dozen set designs for a theatre production team to choose from based only on a few sentences of context, all carried around in your pocket. Suddenly – and this is my somewhat controversial opinion – the value of mastery is somewhat diminished. We will no longer need to wait for the more experienced colleague to help us work out why the code wont compile, or the single point of failure SME who is the only one who really knows how to make two systems talk to each other, or the master designer with a matrix-like understanding of fluid dynamics to identify new approaches to generating lift in planes and downforce in race cars. It could be that we are about to see the end of the era of the specialist and the beginning of the era of the generalist. The generalist who understands many different tasks, process and approaches; the generalist who understands context and is able to match up the right tool or methodology for the job, whether it is within their existing mastered skillset or not.
Communities of practice exist where people come together looking for a Community of other people who Practice in the pursuit of mastery in a common Domain. What does it mean for communities in a world where there is no longer a need for mastery, as any question or challenge you could be presented with can be answered and tackled within seconds? What would the impact be when instead of being a .Net Developer or a legacy RPG Programmer, suddenly the expectation shifts for you to be a true full stack developer that is required to understand and take on parts of each task in the whole delivery lifecycle? If I no longer feel I belong to a domain, will I still seek out communities of practice focussed on it?
I’ve asked a lot of questions today, so I’m now going to give you my three predictions. I do have an overwhelmingly hopeful view of the future, so some of these may prove more realistic than others…
· Communities of Practice will continue to grow and thrive. As long as there are humans completing tasks, there will be people who practice within a domain, and those humans will continue to follow their innate yearning to belong to a community. What we focus on will change, our need to do so will not
· What those communities of practice do when they spend time together will change. Will communities still consider it valuable to spend an hour of their time learning how to master a task, or will they find that it is more valuable to focus on the strategic approach to using a particular technology or approach instead?
· Communities of practice will become more focussed on joy. I am very fond of saying that good managers and business leaders should care about the people in their teams’ happiness because it’s the right thing to do, but even if you genuinely don’t care about the happiness and wellbeing of others, it is a fact that happy people are more productive, are more engaged with their work and lead to a lower staff attrition rate. The thing about generalists is that they take a long time to grow, and as such they will become more valuable. We should see more and more businesses organisations and industries recognising that communities of practice offer them a tried and tested route to improving happiness of employees and community members, and realising that investing in them will become a necessity rather than a nice to have
There is always the potential that we could be hurtling towards some nightmarish dystopian future where herds of roaming terminators enslave mankind whilst the computers-creating-more-effective-computers cycle brings about a singularity which consumes all natural resources and causes the heat death of the universe. I don’t think I believe that though. I think there will be many unforeseen benefits and consequences of the rise of generative AI, and one of which will be the increased desire of people to spend time with other likeminded people. I believe in the future that communities of practice will continue to become more prevalent and widely adopted, and I think we’ll all be better for it.
One last thing….
For the lols, I asked the Bing AI chat what it thought the impact of generative AI tools would be on communities of practice. Its answer was less convincing than the one it gave me when I asked it for recommended reading on communities of practice, but here’s what it said…
Generative AI tools have become increasingly accessible and will impact teaching and learning in numerous ways. AI technologies such as ChatGPT offer new ways to engage students in critical thinking, writing and analysis. AI also can serve as a tool for instructors in the creation of course material1. Besides profound effects on tasks and jobs, generative AI models and associated externalities have raised alarm in the AI governance community. One of the problems with large language models is their ability to generate false and misleading content2. Generative AI may significantly affect the workforce, and the impact on specific groups and local communities could be disproportionately negative3. Bias in algorithms is a costly human oversight. Costly due to its immense impact on marginalized and underrepresented communities4.
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