The Interim That No One Filmed (English)

The topic is already circulating everywhere: at the family dinner table, among coworkers, on nights out with friends. Humanity contemplates artificial intelligence with an uneasy mix of fear and enthusiasm, like someone watching a horizon that promises wonders and, at the same time, threatens to redraw the map of what we are. I prefer to look at the future with optimism, but optimism without realism is only ornament. It is worth examining, with lucidity, the risks that accompany that promise.

A few days ago I was telling my wife how curious it is that cinema plays the role of a dress rehearsal for history. The seventh art trained us for galactic epic: sagas, ships, lightsabers, and droids that already feel almost familiar. It also reconstructed the past for us: Westerns, or the Trojan Horse. And yet almost no one — at least in the popular imaginary I know — paused to narrate the middle. That interim stage in which we still do not travel from planet to planet nor live with robots the way we live with an appliance. AI arrived and, suddenly, we inhabit an interregnum that no one rehearsed on screen: the transit between the society that survived the 2020 pandemic and that Jetsons civilization we all watched as children. We know, or believe we know, how the story ends. What we do not know is what the process of becoming that other society looks like.

What, then, can today's professional do?
Opinions polarize: there are fierce resistors and unconditional enthusiasts. It makes no difference. History suggests that the tide is usually stronger than the dikes. Time and again humanity has advanced driven by curiosity, by the urge to explore, even by that fertile imprudence of someone who accepts an absurd risk just to gain a span of new territory. That is how Columbus reached America: not by certainty, but by an adventurous spirit that did not stop before the possibility of shipwreck. Human beings, when they glimpse an ending and a goal, tend to stretch their limits until they reach them. Knowing that, and independently of your personal judgment, I recommend “surfing” the wave rather than wrestling against it. Whoever plants himself facing the current ends up, almost always, dragged by it.

How should one prepare? hacer, entonces, el profesional de hoy?
The same way we have always prepared for the great mutations of civilization. In 1784 the first steam engines appeared; the railroad and industrialization disordered the world of work and left behind those who only knew how to offer brute force on a production line. Those people moved, reinvented themselves, and learned to navigate the new current. It would be naïve, however, to assume that the precedent will repeat itself identically. What do I mean by that? I mean that this time technology does not threaten only muscle: it also threatens reason, which was precisely the last competitive factor for a large part of the contemporary labor force. A look backward makes it clear. Before the eighteenth century, more than 90% of jobs required physical effort. Today that proportion hovers, on a worldwide average, between 60% and 70%. More than 30% of the world’s population now works in front of a screen or requires only minimal physical force. For centuries technology could replace arms, not so much heads. With what some call the 5th industrial revolution (AI), for the first time human beings could find themselves without a clear way to contribute economic value — neither with the body nor with judgment. In that scenario it would not be unreasonable to imagine unemployment rates climbing, progressively, toward figures as harsh as 40% and even higher. Some reply that such unemployment will come accompanied by a prosperity so abundant that it will neutralize the blow through aggressive deflation. That hypothesis is not unreasonable either: if the production of goods and services is automated almost completely thanks to AI and robotics, the cost of living could tend toward an extraordinary minimum. The problem is the journey. Between mass unemployment and abundance there is an interval that need not be comfortable. Prosperity may take longer to arrive than deterioration takes to set in. It becomes, then, a race against the clock: the same thing that puts us at risk is, paradoxically, the only thing that can carry us forward. It sounds fatalistic, I know. The intention is not to prophesy catastrophes, but to position oneself intelligently before a future that no one possesses with certainty. The most sensible thing is to read the cards that are available and play the strategy with them. A few ideas:

1. Learn a little technology every day. Not only AI, though preferably yes. Tomorrow’s professional will, with high probability, be intertwined with advanced tools: not the superficial use of a chatbot, but systems that multiply efficiency and impact. Become, little by little, a hybrid: part technophile, part expert in the discipline you already practice.

2. Experiment for real. Do not limit yourself to replacing a Google search with a question to ChatGPT. Use what you are learning to build something useful: a workflow, a prototype, a hobby taken further. Skills that never get the hands dirty in the process of being acquired rarely become an advantage.

3. Do not fight the tide. Personal, philosophical, or political convictions should not sabotage your ability to remain in demand, nor your business’s ability to remain competitive. History is full of corporate failures written by stubbornness. In 1975, a Kodak engineer built one of the first digital-camera prototypes. Management did not give it priority and continued clinging to film. Kodak did eventually enter digital photography and in 2005 was the sales leader in that segment; but it was already too late — the margins no longer sustained the empire, and in 2012 it declared bankruptcy. Blockbuster, leader in video rental with more than nine thousand stores in 2004, received in the year 2000 an offer from Reed Hastings to buy Netflix. The executives treated it as a joke and rejected it. A decade later, the video-rental giant had succumbed to Netflix. The moral is cruel but sincere: refusing to participate in innovation is usually a sentence, not a heroic stance.

4. Ask for help. There are people who have invested hours, run tests, and built projects in this terrain and can shorten the path. Georges Morris Consulting is dedicated to taking businesses and people to the maximum of their potential, putting technology on their side instead of letting it operate against them.

No one knows the future with firmness. The most reasonable course is not to guess it, but to become resilient: to be in a position to adapt, whatever happens, and not to be left stranded on the shore while the tide continues its course.

May the market be with you!

~Tony Esquivel Yazbeck | CEO