THE FUTURE OF LEADERSHIP IN THE AGE OF AI

In their debut nonfiction collaboration, Marin and Luka Ivezic, father and son, address the wide range of possibilities and challenges represented by AI.

The authors cite the inroads that AI has made into all aspects of modern life, from the world of investment to the practice of medicine to more mundane things, like everyday finance or automation (self-driving cars, planes that fly and land themselves). They contend that only businesses that have adapted and trained for the inevitable incorporation of AI will survive and thrive. Most likely, there will be no meaningful exceptions: “Even ‘knowledge workers’—engineers, physicians, scientists, lawyers and any other workers who, as business process consultant Thomas Davenport aptly puts it, basically ‘think for a living’—face the likelihood that parts of their current jobs will be automated by AI.” Any reader who’s required in-depth medical diagnostics in the last few years will be able to attest—perhaps uncomfortably—to how extensively this is already true, and likewise, anyone who’s dabbled in investing will know how much of the industry is now conducted by machines. But although the authors here are thorough in their extrapolations of what’s coming, they also seek to reassure their readers. “Are we then headed into a Dark Age where humans will be rendered obsolete?” they ask. “Again, the answer is a resounding, ‘No!’ AI and the other emerging technologies are not a step into a world that says, ‘No humans needed.’ ” The Ivezics expertly articulate the various complex ways AI can mesh with human entrepreneurship, pointing out that human intuition can counterbalance and enhance machine speed and precision specifically because it’s nonquantifiable.

A wide-ranging, accessible look at AI–related changes that are coming for virtually every profession in the 21st century.