Where Do We Go From Here?

At the beginning of each chapter, we’ve started with stories that illustrate the subject to be covered. In this final chapter, I’d like to focus on your story. Imagine where you will be in 10 years. Now imagine how different your daily life will be. What technological advances do you expect? What changes will you make to your lifestyle? How will you be more productive, healthier, or more secure through technology? Take a moment to paint a picture with your brain. Where does AI fit into this picture? You may be using a digital assistant that takes shape as a hologram or a not-quite-human robot. Or you may be enjoying an exciting job as a creative thought leader while an army of bots takes care of your routine chores. How are you delivering training and consuming education? Have you gone back to school, or finally written that novel, assisted by a helpful content bot that did most of the research and suggested a few paragraphs in the first draft? The story you write can be anything you wish, but thinking doesn’t make it happen. The choices you make today will write the story of your tomorrow. I invite you to contemplate a future populated by AI colleagues and employees, in which chats with robots have become commonplace, and connections with your learners are deeply personal and highly agile.

As a learning professional, you will need to pay attention to emerging discoveries in both neuroscience and AI to prepare for the near future of your life and work. Neuroscience teaches us that attention begins with a choice to look in a particular direction. As I mentioned earlier, I believe the COVID-19 crisis will accelerate the development of practical AI, as our war with the coronavirus marshals machine learning to find a treatment and a vaccine. Because AI is already woven into our daily lives, there is little time to spare. We can serve as leaders, helping our organizations adjust to the new reality of an AI-enabled workforce, or we can hold back in ignorance and fear, failing ourselves and the people who depend on us for answers. Here are a few choices you can make today to set your organization on the right path:

• Reboot yourself with a robot.

• Hire a digital assistant.

• Recruit a junior content writer.

• Translate your training with AI.

• Curate your content with AI.

• Manage course registration and payment.

• Get ready for the digital employee.

• Beware the uncanny valley.

• Have a chat with a machine.

• Use a chatbot in your education or training program.

• Deliver performance support at the time of need with a chatbot.

• Challenge the learner to reflect with a chatbot.

• Provide 24/7 performance coaching and support with a chatbot.

• Support new employee onboarding with a chatbot.

• Build a sales coach bot.

• Build a new manager bot.

• Make your LMS smarter.

• Netflix your learning.

• Apply AI to analyze big data and gain big insights.

• Buy a “smart LMS” smartly.

• Plan for your next LMS now.

• Ask better questions.

• Use AI in the recruiting process.

• Train your AI carefully.

• Do the right thing.

• Beware the cobra effect.

• Insist on transparency.

• Be skeptical.

• Insist on a process.

• Sponsor regulation.

• Focus on positive outcomes.

• Trust, but verify.

We’ve Just Landed in a Strange New World

If all this still seems a bit far-fetched, think of it this way. You’ve landed on a new planet. Many things are similar to the home you left behind, but other things are surprising, wonderful, puzzling, frustrating, and scary. You booked a one-way trip, so there’s no point in wishing you could go back in time. In addition to your new surroundings, you discover to your terror that the planet is already inhabited with creatures who are eerily like you, but deeply different in almost every way. Because you have no way of communicating with them, you can’t tell if the natives are friendly or deadly; best to steer clear.

But if you want to survive in this “strange new world,” you must begin a relationship with it. Through trial and error, you’ll learn what you like about this new home. Thanks to your amazing brain, you have no choice but to explore and adapt, however tentatively at first. Each little victory leads to another, bigger win. And each time you figure something out, your brain gives you a rush of dopamine to say, “Keep going. You’re on the right track.”

Along the way, you might even run into other castaways who have found their way onto the same planet. Banding together, you can learn from one another, share ideas, and answer one another’s questions. You increase your likelihood of surviving and even thriving in this seemingly hostile world by leveraging one of the superpowers of the genus Apes—social learning.

Because your genetic code compels you to connect with others, you’ll start to be curious about the native creatures on the planet. Over time, you’ll learn how to share the planet with them, leverage one another’s strengths, and compensate for one another’s weaknesses. You’ll learn so much that your body will change. You’ll develop new skills, and adjust to a new force of gravity and a slightly different, but life-sustaining, atmosphere. Your brain will rewire itself to make you a little more like the native inhabitants, and a little bit less like the people you left behind.

You and your fellow travelers will come to realize that the natives aren’t intent on killing you, infecting you, or taking your job. They’re just what they are, and you are just who you are.

That’s the day you’ll realize that your initial feelings of confusion and fear have faded away, replaced by new sensations of understanding and confidence.

The strange new world will have started to feel like home.