I just finished my first book of the new year--Hillary
Rodham Clinton’s “What Happened,” where she does a detailed post-mortem of her
stunningly unexpected loss to Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential election.
For someone who is not that much tuned in to politics, I was surprised how
engrossed I was with this book from start to finish. The book’s appeal was in
going beyond just describing what was happening on the surface during the
election campaign—anyone who followed the media would have found that information
from a number of other sources. What made the book unique is that it
transcended into the deeper territories of human psyche--accepting the
difficult challenge of going through the grueling schedule of a Presidential
election campaign, knowing it would neither be pretty, nor easy, and then
having to learn how to deal with a soul-crushing defeat and still find a
purpose to keep going.
Midway into the book, in the chapter titled “A Day in the
Life,” Clinton used a phrase “routine and joy.” She used this phrase to
describe the approach she took based on a valuable piece of advice she received
from President Obama to be able to successfully stick to a demanding campaign
schedule spanning over nineteen long months—she announced her candidacy in
April 2015 and the election took place in November 2016. “I put some routines in place to keep my traveling team and me as healthy
and productive as possible through one of the hardest things any of us would
ever do,” she wrote. “And we all tried our best to savor every moment that came
our way—to find joy and
meaning in the daily grind of campaigning.”
It really caught my attention
seeing these two words “routine” and “joy” juxtaposed together —a pair that I
never consciously thought of as being complementary to each other. When you set an ambitious goal
to achieve a lot within a finite time, you got to have a routine. On the other
hand, routine by definition is opposite of spontaneity. In my opinion,
spontaneity and freedom from routine are some of the biggest sources of joy. So
how can routine and joy not clash? But the context in which Clinton used
them together made perfect sense. May be “routine and joy” should be my new
mantra for every project that demands a long arduous journey, I thought. “Routine”
for guaranteed productivity, and “joy” as the fuel to continue on to the finish
line.
But that was not the end of it. In a subsequent
chapter where Clinton expressed her worries about the widespread emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI), including jobs being threatened by AI, a new thought stirred in my head. Instead of
giving equal importance to both routine and joy, can we not use AI to take care
of the routine part of the job, leaving us to do the joyful part of it?
In a
recent article in Forbes, titled, “Millennials, This Is How Artificial Intelligence Will Impact Your Job For Better And Worse,” the author presents
both an optimistic (AI will create more jobs than it will replace) and a
pessimistic (millennials will be most impacted by AI replacing their jobs) view
of AI. I believe AI’s impact should be seen more in terms of change in quality
of a job than change in quantity of available jobs. If a job can be redefined
so that AI does the mundane routine part of the job, leaving the non-routine part
to a real worker so that she finds her job a source of joy in her life, then
everyone wins.
Of course an argument can be made that if AI becomes sophisticated enough to handle even the joyful “creative” part of a job and costs the employer less, then at least some of the for-profit employers would not hesitate to employ AI without thinking much about how the joy is being taken away from a real human for the sake of efficiency. Perhaps the key to stay relevant in today’s job market is to embrace “routine and joy” together—the way that Clinton described it—rather than thinking that routine is the joyless part of a job that should be outsourced to AI. After all, AI is “intelligent,” albeit artificial. You would not even realize when AI has "learned" to manipulate you so that you unwittingly give away some tasks to AI that were the sources of joy for you.
So millennials—make AI your friend, not your slave. Share both the routine part and the joyous part of you job with AI for a happy synergy.
Of course an argument can be made that if AI becomes sophisticated enough to handle even the joyful “creative” part of a job and costs the employer less, then at least some of the for-profit employers would not hesitate to employ AI without thinking much about how the joy is being taken away from a real human for the sake of efficiency. Perhaps the key to stay relevant in today’s job market is to embrace “routine and joy” together—the way that Clinton described it—rather than thinking that routine is the joyless part of a job that should be outsourced to AI. After all, AI is “intelligent,” albeit artificial. You would not even realize when AI has "learned" to manipulate you so that you unwittingly give away some tasks to AI that were the sources of joy for you.
So millennials—make AI your friend, not your slave. Share both the routine part and the joyous part of you job with AI for a happy synergy.
