A little over a year ago I wrote something on Opinion Paper entitled "Where AI Goes." I gave it great caution. In essence, what I said then was this:
If a machine does what humans cannot do, it expands human capability. If a machine does what humans can do, it replaces human capability.
It's been a year. You can barely use the Internet now without using AI. It's in every search engine. It's in your phone. Increasingly, it's in every application.
What is AI? Because "artificial intelligence" is a terrible definition. AI is a prediction engine, running at a scale no human can match. In the same way a spreadsheet calculates pages of numbers no human could work through by hand, AI reads and digests information and can actually discuss it with us. Everything else it appears to do - synthesize, simulate, advise - is prediction at that scale.
It all depends on what you give it.
Humans aren't always logical and AI doesn't always understand what we ask, so sometimes the conversation is weird. But AI has moved into the spaces defined by rigid rules and logic and started to dominate. Programming most visibly of all.
No programmer writes out zeros and ones. We use tools that create those for us when we type out code. Now we use a newer tool that creates the code when we express what we want. We call that a prompt.
If you think about it, every CEO and every manager has been prompting for years. "Susan, I need that report for Tuesday's meeting." How is that different from "Grok, create that report I need"?
By my thesis from last year, Susan isn't required any longer.
But that isn't the only possible outcome - Susan can now prompt too. She can marshal agents and produce what previously took a department. She doesn't have to be replaced - she can promote herself into the CEO's chair. That's the part I didn't see. Replacement isn't the endpoint. It's a rung for those who choose it.
The catch is what the chair requires. The new skill is management, and good management is judgment - knowing what's worth building, and telling good work from work that merely looks good.
Most people don't have experience being a manager or CEO. Judgment isn't obvious. It's built from success and failure you could trace back to your own decision. Susan can review a report generated by AI and determine its quality because she spent years writing bad ones and finding out why they were bad.
The machine can write bad output. Without judgment, nobody discovers it.
That's why social media is awash in confident nonsense, and why it keeps getting harder to spot. AI can polish a turd to a high shine - not just pictures and video, but arguments. Feed it idiocy and it will hand you back a well-organized case for the idiocy. It's a prediction engine. It has no stake in whether the prediction is any good.
Back to programming: prompting a website requires the ability to state clearly the requirement, the aesthetic, the format, and the quality. It requires testing, which requires looking for the unexpected, which only comes from experience.
Consider the person without construction experience who wants to prompt a big, open concept home with robots one day. For that big, open space, is there enough load-bearing bracing to support such a structure in a bad storm? Quality construction can only come with quality experience and judgment.
In a post-job economy, we enter the management economy. The core requirement will be a humble and careful wisdom.
Or we will build structures of confident nonsense.
2 Comments
Well said.
Like everything else related to IT AI is nothing but a more elaborate tool.
It can be useful as long as we remember what it is and what it isn't. It's nothing but another algorithm layer with enhancements on a search engine.
Certainly isn't flawless. Despite its very real helps, it's also prone to mistakes and inaccuracies based often on either blind spots or intentional bias by its developers.
Problem is over time Americans will be influenced by such bias. Just look at the intentional manipulation and deceit that has taken a nation from fearing God to ignorantly too often believing "good" means not allowing biblical principles...truth in taxpayer funded schools or government!
(I've been having just that discussion with Evan Hunt on FB).
President Trump does many amazing and long overdue good things. But despite his obvious and effective sincere desire to help American Citizens, even he makes mistakes.
He got bad advice from evil people and rushed an unproven delivery system for a jab that ended up handing a tool for Biden to misuse to destroy people's lives and / or careers by making it mandatory.
Likewise, President Trump sees the danger posed by China getting the upper hand on AI. So he pushes it hard...OK, but he also specifically prevents states (it anyone else) from putting constitutional guardrails on AI.
After the evil done by Biden with the jab, and the violations of constitutional rights we saw and experienced during the pandemic, we must realize that will be nothing compared to what AI will do once it gains sufficient (apparent) "intelligence" and power to dominate American society, governance and military.
Those same unintentional (or intentional biases) "lapses" or mistakes will fast become glaring dangers to our well being and eventually our very lives.
We must get limitations of political power, influence and especially outright restrictions hard-coded into all AI coding, algorithms, etc that can never be allowed to violate the Constitutional rights of American Citizens!
Agreed.
In my new book, I say that when decisions are removed from us, we miss the opportunity to obey God. That's the real beauty of limiting government. It helps us maximize our walk with God.