Adapt to change
TED 2024 Day 4 Lesson: AI everywhere & positive possibilities
Welcome to Level Up: Your source for career growth solutions & community by retired Amazon Vice President, Ethan Evans.
Six weeks after taking a new job as a Director at Amazon the VP I had picked to work for was moved to a new role.
I was immediately afraid.
Who would be my new boss? What would this do to my career?
It is much easier to imagine negative consequences than the positive possibilities of a change.
Humans are wired to first think about the risks as a survival trait.
In our history, an unexpected change could mean starvation or animal attack, so our brains work first to consider the risks.
This instinct misleads us in the modern world.
I was recently coaching someone who had the same situation I described, where a manager he had chosen to work for was being replaced.
The lesson: *force* yourself to also imagine the positives from the change.
In my case, the new VP became one of my best managers and he invested in my career, pushing me to Amazon Vice President myself.
I believe I was ultimately much better for the change.
Now whenever I face "negative" surprises I remember this situation and hold on to my hope that it will be better, not worse.
AI will obviously change our world.
It was the number one topic at the 2024 TED Conference this week.
Someone counted that AI was mentioned 330+ times at TED.
It is easy to envision bad side effects. Job loss, concentration of wealth, automated war machines, AI-takeover of humanity, deepfakes, election tampering, etc.
I forced myself to lean into the joy: AI can automate our mundane tasks and enable robots to do our manual labor.
And it can do so much more:
In my favorite demo, a game developer is bringing characters to life so that we can interact with our favorite fiction forever. Very soon there will be a world where you can tell your AI media service "I have 75 minutes. Make me a short movie in the Star Trek universe but with more humor and a main character based on the life work of John Wayne." Or you can take it further, and ask for a one-hour Star Wars game where you are one of the Jedi. Personalized, on-demand entertainment is coming!
AI can help delay or soften dementia by recreating visual images of memories from verbal descriptions. We saw a demo of an elderly woman recreating a lost scene from her childhood that had never been photographed
AI can create ghosts of our lost relatives. We saw a demo of a woman "meeting" her grandfather by transcribing all his written letters into an AI, and then interacting with this version of him on novel topics. Of course, this is not really him, but it was still meaningful and joyful for her.
While AI could lead to job loss and further wealth inequality, it can also lead to a world where supported by AI, I will be able to focus on my most fulfilling work and do a better job than I possibly can today.
Living in a world where I do my very best work while enjoying customized, personalized entertainment is my dream for AI.
At TED it seemed possible.
More TED day four tidbits.
I spoke with Jay Herratti, CEO of TED, about the TED organization and will profile how TED operates as a business in the future.
I spoke in depth with Guy Winch, a 3x TED presenter and speaker ambassador, about how alumni speakers assist new speakers in being successful. I have Guy's top three tips for a successful TED talk that I will compare and contrast in a future post to what TED Director of Speaker Coaching, Briar Goldberg, told me.
I spoke to veteran curator Cyndi Stivers about how the team of curators chooses what will become TED talks from the 1000s of applications they receive each year. I will write a post on the curators and what they look for.
Stats on who attends TED:
1 in 5 are CEOs.
1800+ attendees.
60+ countries represented.
70+ speakers.
Music artist Kesha’s TED Talk performance as part of the program closing ceremony.
Note: This is the last daily TED update as the conference ends at noon on the final day. Over the next few weeks, we will mix in lessons from TED with our usual career advice.
Additional TED posts
If you are interested in leadership development, explore my courses:
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"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one most adaptable to change." - Charles Darwin