AI and The Age of Questions

Lately I’ve been taking stock of the successful use cases for AI which I’ve seen popping up with increasing frequency and have started thinking hard about what the future of work looks like for us all. That future is still shrouded in a fog which defies hopes of a clear vision but I’m seeing a some meta-trends taking shape with enough resolution that gives me a hint in at least one particular direction.

Efforts at AI adoption are occurring across every industry, workflow, and use case. Chat bots, content generation, loan decisions, anti-money laundering, user activity monitoring, and executive strategy all have seen AI situate itself at the heart of all future solutions under consideration (to name only a few). This heterogeneity makes for a great challenge in distilling high-level insights, however what I believe every use case shares in some manner is the intent to excavate and surface case-relevant information at a hyper-expedited pace.

And so, if the future is a world where almost any information you seek is available at whim, where does that leave us? Where does any one person or organization find an edge?

I believe the answer is in the ability to ask the right questions: the most enlightened, timely, and relevant questions which others have not yet perceived the importance of asking in the first place.

To some extent, asking the right questions has always been a separator. My own career is a story of unlikely twists and unexpected turns and, in the main, I’ve been able to navigate it by being fairly decent at using well-framed, well-targeted questions to find a wrinkle in situations which seemed otherwise intractable. However, what I think is different about the era we’re moving into is that this will become the primary skill which every person and organization needs to become deeply acquainted with and sharpen.

In short, we’re entering the Age of Questions.

Output generation and menial tasks will be automated to a degree as to be made trivial (indeed, I believe the only human-generated output which will matter will be the truly artistic — emanating from the soul of another person and thus carrying a value insuperable by any machine). As such, the real work will be in querying the frontier of knowledge with the aim of taking a step into the unknown guided by a hypothesis gleaned from that knowledge frontier.

Each step — whether that be a new technology or strategic decision — will immediately lead to evaluation and validation of that step. If it appears to be an error in judgment, course correction will occur. If the step leads to reward, the next round of hypothesis will begin anew. In either case, the driving activity will be enlightened questioning, turbocharged by a fully-matured AI information-surfacing interface.

This status seems recursive. Once questions become the only thing that matters, more or less, it’s hard to imagine where that process comes to a conclusion since each iteration yields a new version of itself. Perhaps we eventually arrive at a world where even enlightened questions about the unknown become tractable engineering challenges but such things are many orders of magnitude more complex than anything we’ve yet achieved, and so seems generations (perhaps centuries) away in the distant future.

For now, as we enter the Age of Questions, we should all concern ourselves with becoming masterful actors within it.