Am I relevant?

Perceptions

Rubén Barrera Millán

The world keeps changing all the time. It is mention that if it changes then it is alive.

When the change is faster than us, then we become irrelevant, we feel behind and sometimes we might feel that we do not fit on it.

When you see that we cannot understand something, that makes you feel pretty uncomfortable, but also you are aware that either you update yourself to the new reality or you will frustrate trying to make things be as they used to be.

You can say that all times are demanding and ever changing, which is true to some extent, but today the speed of the changes we are suffering are impressive.

Everyday technology is more accessible either in price to the end user as well as the understanding to make a good use of it.

Let´s take the computers, at the beginning (60’s) it costed Millions USD, and were placed in a complete room, and also those capable to interact with them were well trained engineers. Today, we can get computers at 10 USD and a 5 years old boy can interact and make use of it.

Artificial Intelligence and Augmented reality (AI & AR) are the coming frontiers to pass. As with any new big technology change there are understandable concerns (and well-founded fears), especially with AI in which there an ugly term “Singularity” that refers to the point in which computer SW&HW will match Human intelligence.

Then the question comes, Am I relevant in this environment? Can I compete with computers AI? Would I be replaced by an intuitive SW that will be able to take better decisions? considering it will have access to Terabytes of information and memory to correlate and more powerful processing capacity and actually… without the barriers of feelings that temps to present a foggy vision.

The statement we placed at the beginning, let us with very little space for self-improvement, then we should replace the question to: How can I use all this new technology to be successful?

Then we can see that technology should be use to empower our talents. Those who write now have better tools to find relevant information, and also to make their notes be read to millions at once. Those who present ideas, have access to millions and better organized photo and bibliotheca. Of course if we stick to keep filling forms and reports, it is very possible that you work would be integrated into an intuitive Software.

So it is a matter to refocus our work and activities to more creative works and activities in which machines have very little possibility to compete and instead can be seen as complementary to us.

So let us start thinking on how to make use of technology to improve our talents.