Superpower #9: Courage

I have become increasingly fascinated in the last few months with AI.  I’ve been reading like crazy (like I always do) and I’ve been listening to podcasts and dabbling with AI in my day-to-day life. I have to say that, so far, I have by and large been underwhelmed by the actual practical applications. I am still more comfortable with web searches I undertake on my own and have found the links and assistance provided by AI to be limited and unreliable, at best, and useless, annoying and even downright false at worst. I don’t expect things to stay this way, given the rate at which the world is changing. I have no doubt that at some point, possibly in the very near future, my musings will seem terribly naïve and ill informed, but for now, I am truly doing my best to understand, apply as possible, and try to think through the implications to you and your siblings’ future. In the end, my overarching mission in life is to ensure that I have sent you into the world as equipped as I possibly can for the challenges you will face. AI will certainly be one of them. In fact, it already is.

I’m watching how your teachers and other school administrators are struggling to integrate these new tools into their day-to-day systems. The high school you just bid goodbye to has long been on the cutting edge of new technologies and philosophies around education. They occupy a unique position in today’s environment as they are largely populated by high income, high achieving, deeply involved and stable families and students.  Your dad and I are risk-takers, and we willingly signed you and all your siblings up for what amounted to a significant experiment with your schooling by enrolling you in a Spanish speaking dual language program from kindergarten on. The upside of this gamble is that you are all dual language certified by the State of Iowa in Spanish. The downside is that your knowledge of American history and English language and grammar is somewhat lacking. AI will help you close this gap. And perhaps it will close the gap of foreign languages soon as well. It is not hard to imagine a computer that can translate spoken words in real time as people attempt to communicate. It is not hard to imagine a lot of really difficult inconveniences being irradicated by AI in the short term. It is both not hard and impossibly hard. There are also some very dire and terrifying projections being discussed (loudly, incessantly) on the internet around the prospects of AI and its power and potential. I have deliberately sought out more voices in this space because some of the warnings are quite apocalyptic. Turns out, there is both enormous positive potential and substantial, and frightening, risks.  How can you possibly navigate what is coming and may, indeed, already be here? 

The answer is your 9^th superpower: courage. You will need to be strong, physically and mentally, and you will need to be willing to take action in the face of what will likely be significant uncertainty. This is one of your superpowers. You will not hesitate to step out and step up. So much of leadership (which I wrote about earlier) is also about courage, and you are courageous.  

(Sidenote: It occurred to me as I labored over a recent post that I no longer have to worry about how beautiful my words sound. I gamely gave my Microsoft co-pilot a prompt to help me close one of these essays. What it returned was really, really good. Maybe not exactly how I might say it, but good. It was heartfelt and useful and expressed my feelings with startling acuity.  I realized I could finally remove the pressure on myself to make this sound perfect. A gift with words and writing may soon be one of the least useful of superpowers. For me, this could represent a significant threat as exceptional grammar and ease with the written and spoken word have long been my go-to strengths. Suddenly my abilities in this space are rendered obsolete—AI says it quicker and better and allows my less verbose colleagues to compose beautiful emails and speeches with relative ease. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) not many other academic specialties will fare much better. My fast math friends will never out-calculate a computer; the best history buffs will never better remember the dates of wars and births and deaths. The bottom line is I can let myself off the hook a little bit in making this a great work of writing. Instead, I can try to make it what no computer will ever craft--a great work of love. I can assemble a collection of my fondest memories of my exuberant, chubby blue-eyed girl and the years she made my home a place of laughter and joy. AI could maybe describe it better if I gave it enough of the right prompts, but it can never feel and live the wonder of those years).

So, you’ll have to be brave, in this new world, because computers will probably be better at every superpower we possess, at least the academic ones. Lucky for you, you have always lived better in the real world of interaction (social and physical) than in the world of the mind. You’re a doer and a leaper, not a ponderer. And that’s lucky, because the coming AI situation (revolution?) will likely be able to do all our best thinking for us. But it won’t be able to hug like you, or catch a ball like you, or light up a room like you. It will never “feel the fear and do it anyway”, like you so often and willingly do. Yes, it will take a lot of courage to face the next phase in our technology journey, and you, my super CC, are braver than you know.