Everybody is in a race to be the best these days. The pressure to deliver is mounting: pull up the fanciest slide deck, crunch the highest number, ship products at a speed that makes the term “sprint” obsolete.
There are no winners in this game yet; that much we know. But we still don’t know that much yet; this we have to admit. Anyone claiming they found the golden path will be debunked tomorrow. No offense. It’s just the way it is in tech right now. So carry on.
However, with all the upskilling and outscaling we do to stay competitive, it seems that we’re forgetting to focus on building one important character trait. With the disruption and instability we have brought upon ourselves lately, possessing and honing this trait could be just what we need to win.
Win what? You might ask. Well, we have many adversaries. Let’s pick one that most of us recognize. Who is our common enemy today? Who are we up against in this race?
It’s not a who. It’s a what.
I suppose you already know that, (but if you thought it was a person, you might be right, though that’s for another story). If you guessed that I was going to say AI is our enemy, then that’s not exactly what I have in mind.
I don’t believe that we are up against the robots nor the software inside them that we so love to blame. It’s easy to say that AI is taking our jobs, killing our environment, or annihilating our people. It’s convenient to point a finger to an inanimate entity, even if it doesn’t understand consequences nor guilt (because how could it do so when it didn’t grow up with suffering like we did). It’s even easier to use it as a scapegoat for hoarding wealth and weapons that can erase civilizations. Forgive me; I digress to another enemy.
But why pick a fight with something we can never beat? Within the known forms of intelligence such as mathematics, logic and linguistics, there is no way we will be as good as AI. There is no fight about that.
What we’re really fighting with is our irrelevance. Who would need us tomorrow?
Allow me to share a personal story: A year ago, my father suffered from a subdural hematoma. One night, he fell off the bed in his sleep and hit his head. A month later, he had forgotten all of us. The blood clot pushed our names out of his memory. And just like that, the children he dedicated his whole life to abruptly blurred away, as if our existence is nothing but a mere electrical signal suspended in a synapse.
When he woke up from the surgery, we had a family call. As you often see in movies, the first thing each of us asked him was, “Tatay, do you know who I am?”, to which he answered, “No. But were you ever relevant in my life?”
I don’t know why, but when I heard him say it, I laughed so hard it made me cry. Maybe it was the funny smirk on his face, or the relief that he was still alive, that turned my sudden irrelevance into a sweet joke. Or maybe it was just because I really didn’t believe I was irrelevant. In my heart, I will always be my father’s daughter and no subdural hematoma can ever erase that fact.
My father did recover. Slowly, he started remembering us again; the signals coalescing back into faces and eventually, into old memories. That’s how fascinating our brain is. Who’s to tell what it can and cannot do. Human life is unpredictable like that. Hence, we shouldn’t stop fighting a battle we can still possibly win.
How do we win over irrelevance? I have an idea.
I believe that you could become the most relevant person in the room right now when you raise your hand to say,
“I’m the one accountable”
Let’s talk about accountability.
When was the last time you took one for the team?
When did you accept a responsibility that comes with high risks and dire consequences, instead of saying “that’s not my job”?
When did you make a decision that no one else is willing to?
When did you own up to mistakes that you didn’t commit alone?
What are you accountable for?
A common question tech people throw around a lot these days is “If I used an autonomous agent, who would be accountable?”
If you’re asking, I’m assuming you didn’t consider yourself to be the one.
If we are all asking, and even the brightest of us can’t answer that, I’m assuming we’re collectively losing our relevance.
I don’t blame anyone. Being accountable is hard. It can’t be simply trained—it has to be accepted with absolute willingness. It’s not a skill, but a character that can only be built through competence and morality. Competence can be acquired with time, tools and tenacity. Morality, the ability to discern and make a choice based on your belief of what is right and wrong, must come from within. It’s rooted in who you are, what you value and how you see others as an essential part of you.
You can’t be accountable if you can’t do the job. You can’t be accountable if you don’t care for others or feel the pain of causing others pain.
This is our enemy: our inability to take accountability is making us irrelevant.
The unfortunate truth is many can do the job, but they don’t care about anyone but themselves. And there are many who genuinely care but they don’t have the time or the tools to be as competent.
However, let’s not despair. This is not yet a tragedy. This is still an opportunity.
If we want to win, we must fill the room with relevant people: People who are willing to be accountable for the products being put out there. People who will raise their hands when asked to take the lead, as well as the fall. People who have names and not just ID’s, who will walk to the frontline when problems arise. People who have a face and good conscience that shines right through their eyes.
We need to find more people who care about lives and making them worth living. Then, we need to make them competent, give them time to grow and hand them agents, autonomous or not, to build something wonderful for the ones they truly care about.
If you’re a leader and you want to win, find these people.
If you’re in the race and you want to win, be the person who we badly need right now.
Someone accountable. Someone who cares.