Guest AuthorRajiv Jayaraman
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Recipe for personal success in the digital era

By | Rajiv Jayaraman | Founder-CEO, KNOLSKAPE ; Author: Clearing the Digital BLUR, TEDx speaker, Chief People Officer, Talent Transformation

I am in the process of writing a book called “Clearing the Digital BLUR”. The fundamental premise of the book is that many lines that we are used to from the industrial and early part of the information age have started blurring away. We now live in a Digital BLUR world characterized by Boundary-less organization and industries, Limitless digitization, Unbounded innovation and Relentless iteration.

Many organizations are falling by the wayside because leaders and organizations are either failing to either notice the blurring lines or struggling to respond to the after-effects of Digital BLUR. While a large part of the book focuses on the trends revolving around the BLUR and the recommended response from companies to clear the BLUR, I started thinking about what this really mean to us, as individuals. I tried to boil it down to a few realities.

Reality #1 All that can be automated, will be

That most of our work processes can be automated and robotized is now a foregone conclusion. The question that I ponder about a lot these days is, “As AI becomes more human, will we become more robotized or more human?”.

If there’s anything we have learned from history, it is the fact the tools that we invent become our masters over time. Thanks to the rapid advancements in Machine learning and AI, things that we thought were uniquely human are now being done by algorithms and in most cases, with unprecedented efficiency and quality. With poetry writing, music composition, dancing, playing golf, driving a car scratched off from the list, we are left with very few things that we can label as uniquely human. 

How should we respond to this unprecedented situation? As I see it, there is only one way: by becoming more human, looking within for inspiration and doing things that are uniquely you.

Reality #2 Machines are learning, we are not

We take breaks, go on holidays, fall sick, don’t feel up to it some days. Machines don’t go through any of this, except for some planned / unplanned downtime. They keep learning all the time. All-The- Time. We, on the other hand, stagnate and saturate. So how are we supposed to keep up? At this point, there are still a few things that humans can do: imagine possibilities, be curious and learn with agility and purpose. Imagination, curiosity and learning agility are critically important for us to stay relevant.

“The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is curiosity.” —Edmund Burke

Reality #3 Blue Collar, White Collar, Metal Collar

We inherited the terms blue collar and white collar from the industrial era. Now a third type of collar is getting added to the mix: Metal collar.

The Metal collar, the robotic workforce, can now take over large parts of blue and white-collar work. Does that mean that jobs will go away? The answer is yes and no. Yes, many jobs will go away but many more will be created.

What I am supremely confident about is our stellar ability to create more problems with these innovations. Humans have an impeccable track record with this. Looking back, it is not like the industrial era wiped away all our problems. We, in fact, created monstrous problems that are much larger than what we can solve as individuals– sustainability, income inequality, global warming etc.

In the future, successful people will be the ones who take learning in their own hands, build a tribe that cares about a cause and gain deep experiences in domains to be able to solve massive problems. 

Republished with permission and originally published at Rajiv Jayaraman’s LinkedIn

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