Natalia Bielczyk on work in a BANI world, becoming our own Zen masters, AI in recruitment, and contagious empathy (AC Ep58)

“It’s not about the amount we say; it’s about making what we say really count. We can use some of these tools to write the long version, so that we can then quickly create the short version and really dial in.”

– Natalia Bielczyk

About Natalia Bielczyk

Natalia Bielczyk is Founder & CEO of Ontology of Value, an R&D, EdTech, and consulting agency. She holds a PhD in Computational Neuroscience and is author of three books, including the forthcoming ‘The Longest Journey: The Ultimate Guide To Self-Navigation In the Job Market’.

Website: www.nataliabielczyk.com

LinkedIn: @nataliabielczyk

X: @nbielczyk_neuro

Facebook: @drnataliabielczyk

Instagram: @nataliabielczyk

Book: The Longest Journey: The Ultimate Guide To Self-Navigation in the Job Market

What you will learn

• Exploring the impact of Black Swan events on the future of work
• Understanding the role of AI in accelerating job market trends
• Navigating the BANI world with better filtering mechanisms
• Balancing AI and human judgment in recruitment processes
• Emphasizing the importance of work ethic in the AI era
• Discovering personal productivity hacks for focused work
• Fostering empathy and kindness in a technology-driven workplace

Episode Resources

• ChatGPT
• BANI vs VUCA
• Upwork Research Institute
• Artificial Intelligence
• LLMs
• Netflix
• The Coded Bias
• Machine learning

People

• Joy Buolamwini
• Tony Robbins

Books

• Thriving on Overload: The 5 Powers for Success in a World of Exponential Information by Ross Dawson
• Awaken the Giant Within : How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny! by Tony Robbins

Transcript

Ross Dawson: Natalia, it’s a delight to have you on the show.

Natalia Bielczyk: Thank you so much for your invitation. Ross, I’m honored to be here.

Ross: So we have a changing world of work, and people have been talking about the future of work for quite a few years, and I think we’re already well into the future of work, but it’s changing fast. I’d love to start off by just getting your high level perspective on what are the things that we should be looking to in shaping a better future of work?

Natalia: Absolutely. Actually, ever since we faced the Covid 19 pandemic, I think the number of black swan events actually got- I have a feeling that these events got denser and denser, so it’s really hard to I can tell, from a perspective of a neuroscientist that research over the potential future of work is so much more challenging than neuroscientific research because we cannot really foretell in the long run, how these incoming black swan events that we by definition cannot predict, will shape the future of work. Each one of them seems to not necessarily change the future of work, but more like accelerate the progress. So the covid 19 pandemic, it didn’t qualitatively change the the job market, but it speeded up the processes that were already going on by 10 years and and then I believe that the premiere of chatgpt was yet another event that, again, since OpenAI was the first big tech company who showed balls to actually release the top tier software to the public, and then that actually prompted others to come to the scene. That was, again, just speeding up a process that was already going on. Most of these models were already in development for many years prior to the premier of GPT. Seems like one player came to the scene, others followed, and now we have almost an arms race, and that’s fundamentally changing the job market. So we don’t know what comes next. Maybe the US presidential elections will change the scene. Maybe. We cannot really tell, like, what will happen with respect to global events and groundbreaking points in technology worldwide in the next 2, 3, 5, years. We can make some educated guesses for the future. In this episode, I’ll share some of my educated guesses. Obviously, it’s only a guess, but I hope that it’s useful as well. 

Ross: Well, I think it’s also not so much about guessing. I mean, that’s part of the thing: being a futurist, you don’t try to predict, because we don’t know. But it’s around really saying, ‘what is it we can do that can shape a better future’? So there are all these forks in the road and uncertainties, and all sorts of extraordinary things will happen that we can’t predict. I think a lot of it is around saying, ‘well, if we want to create a better future of work, what is it that we need to be doing today’? That’s really the heart of the question.

Natalia: Right. There are a few things that we should be doing as soon as possible. First of all, I think education is always the answer. Let me elaborate on this. At this moment, we live in the world of so -called BANI, which is an abbreviation for brittle, anxious, nonlinear and incomprehensible. Brittle, anxious, nonlinear and incomprehensible world. It’s a new concept, yes, it’s been floating around for the past two, three years, as opposed to the previous concept, the world of VUCA. So now that the world became even more hard to comprehend, that’s the new big thing in the future of work area, BANI as a concept.

Basically, what we need as individuals is better filtering mechanisms. I think it’s really hard to tell the difference between events that we should really be considering as important to us and the events that actually seem relevant. And I have to say that I learn every day, because there are so many global events like the Olympic Games or the elections in the US. I’m Polish, I consider myself European. I often visit the US, but I’m still a European citizen, and for me, it’s really hard to tell sometimes which global events and which news, also in technology, which new software is actually relevant to me. There was a lot of research also, with respect to utilizing AI for work and a new research by Upwork Research Institute showed that 77% of employees, all from executives through specialists to freelancers, they had 5000 subjects in the study, so it was a massive study, and showed that 77% of them actually declared that AI hampered their productivity and increased the workload. 

If you don’t know what is actually relevant and worth using, and you don’t have the right filtering mechanisms, your personal world becomes even more incomprehensible, and your workload and also cognitive load becomes more unbearable than before. I think one thing that we definitely should be doing is to have better filtering mechanisms and become our own Zen masters and the masters of creating, I would call it a sensory warmth, so when we work we have to really be selective with what kind of stimuli we allow to enter to our world, and AI should help us to filter and not give us additional cognitive burden. So that’s something I’m always trying to do for myself. For instance, one way of utilizing AI in our favor while working is to browse using AI as a gatekeeper to keep yourself screened from all the dopamine shots, such as banners online, random advertisements, all the trash that you are actually bombed with every single day. For me personally, browsing World Wide Web through GPT or other LLMs is actually beneficial in that way. The main benefit is not that it’s actually extracted knowledge that is structured to answer my specific question, but it’s more that it screens me from unnecessary stimuli. That I could recommend, using LLMs for that reason.

That’s one thing we can do. But also there’s so many other things. For instance, I think what multitasking is today is often understood as- I think it’s a great misunderstanding, because we always try to do too many things, but our mind only has one channel of consciousness, so we cannot really multitask. We are like computers that are analog, that only have one main process going on, right? They cannot complete multiple processes at a time. So we, like computers, can only switch between different processes quickly. So we are the same, and multitasking in 2024 should