Losing Our Heads Over AI

8 min read

Rudyard Kipling famously wondered whether “you can keep your head, while all about you are losing theirs?”  Since I have not the slightest bit of a problem quoting things completely out of context, I find myself asking the same thing about artificial intelligence. 

Everyone is losing their bloody mind.  

Those among us who are endowed with less than a full share of intelligence truly believe that AI is the second coming of technology. They know, with certainty, that it will solve all the world’s problems, without requiring the slightest bit of effort. They do not get that AI works by recognizing patterns. It can only synthesize the data on which it is trained. If you turn it loose on a mess, you can expect to receive a beautified mess. Way back at the dawn of the computer age, the term “garbage in, garbage out” was coined to indicate that the quality of outputs depends on the quality of inputs. AI does not change that, except to accelerate the rate at which garbage can be produced, and how pretty it can be made to look. 

The greedy among us have convinced themselves that AI will allow them to make more money without doing more work. They can just fire a whole whack of employees and pocket the savings. There is certainly work that AI can do faster and cheaper than humans. Yet stories abound about companies terminating droves of employees and wreaking havoc on their lives, thinking that AI could replace them, and then saying, “oops, my bad.”  

Then we have the devious executives who have mismanaged their companies to the point of crisis. Their idea of a solution is to conduct an “AI Washing” scheme, where they announce layoffs due to their new AI initiative, often without bothering to produce a viable plan to implement AI to replace the fired folks. They figure that they can pump the stock price up for a while, worry about the eventual plummet later, all without the slightest concern for their formerly loyal, and currently devastated, employees. 

I would be remiss if I did not mention the law firm senior partner who told his junior associates   not to come to him for help because they could get all of the answers that they need from the very first iteration of Chat GPT. 

And of course, for every well-run company that is going to select and implement AI in an organized manner, relying upon expensive experts who know what they are doing, and charge accordingly, there are a bazillion companies who will buy their AI programs from the vendor with the fanciest presentation software, and then declare to the world that they have arrived in the AI era and can now charge more for their products and services. 

I can hardly hold myself back from ranting about the businesses who are pushing their “AI solutions” at consumers in every software package that was working just fine without it, making it difficult to decline, calling it an “enhancement,” and upping their subscription price. I personally would reserve a special place in hell for the executives who came up with that scheme, and assign an AI powered devil to watch over them. Maybe even give them an AI staffed call centre to handle their complaints, where they can get into a nonsense loop for all of eternity, and must forever answer the question of whether the latest response resolved their problem. 

I suppose that I should reserve a small critical paragraph for those few well-run companies who are going to implement AI properly. Presumably, they will still have senior employees who, in the old days, became senior employees by doing stuff as junior employees. Do you think that they will speak to education experts to determine how to effectively train people to become senior employees if AI is doing the work of the junior employees? I am guessing not. 

But enough about the companies who are running off half-cocked in a rush to buy AI “solutions” from charlatans, and then proceeding to implement technology that they do not understand to accomplish unrealistic goals without any regard whatsoever for the human cost of their unrestrained desire to increase their profits. Let’s talk instead about the employees who are using and abusing AI, because here is where it really gets interesting.  

How can they screw things up? Let me count the ways: 

1. We have the young folks just entering the job market who have learned in school that they can use AI to write their term papers and their take-home exams. It worked there, so why not try out their expertise in writing prompts on the job, whether or not they have the smarts and experience to write the best prompts, or to judge the quality of the output? 
2. Then we have those employees who work for companies with limited policies in place for using AI. Let’s plug our client’s confidential information into the free version of Chat GPT because we don’t know any better. We are a law firm and are supposed to know better? Oops! We just blew our client’s legal privilege? Oops again! We were supposed to keep our proprietary information secret – oops once more! Sad face emoji!
3. Of course, some employees find themselves working for employers who have robust AI policies. There are strict rules, such as only using authorized versions of AI installed by the employer. But those can be inconvenient, so why not use Chat GPT on my phone, they think? Who is going to know?
4. And of course, let’s not forget about the crowd who are just adopting whatever mistakes and hallucinations AI throws out without any critical thought, and presenting them to bosses, clients, and even judges.  

Of course, when employees are not using and abusing AI to get their work done, they keep busy by worrying about whether it is going to take their jobs away. Perhaps instead of devoting their efforts to worrying, they should be looking at their skill set, figuring out how easily their job can be replaced by a machine, and thinking about how to make themselves irreplaceable. 

And what about professionals? Let’s take lawyers for example. Some of them are “technicians” who see themselves as being in the business of selling real estate closings, or lease reviews, or incorporations, or non-disclosure agreements, or employment contracts. These technicians fall into two camps. First, there are those who know in their heart that AI is a fad that will soon pass. They will just keep doing things the old-fashioned way, and all will be well. The rest of them are scrambling to find AI solutions so that they can stay competitive and win the pricing race to the bottom of the heap. Ditto for the Accountant technicians selling tax returns. They are all doomed, every single one of them. What they should be doing, is figuring out how to win the loyalty of clients who are looking for strategic advisors, not merely technicians.  

So where does all of this leave us?  

I suggest that we must get back to basics. AI is a tool. Nothing more, and nothing less. Tools do not operate themselves. They are either used by skilled craftspeople to make jobs more efficient, or by amateurs who hurt themselves trying to use them because they do not know what they are doing. In the hands of a professional, a chainsaw is a powerful tool. In my hands, it is hazardous. In fact, if I were to use one, I may not even have hands much longer. 

For businesses, getting back to basics means: 

1. Understanding how your industry or your job is going to be affected by AI. Will its viability be adversely affected, regardless of improvements in efficiency? 
2. If your industry can remain viable, determining whether you need to use AI to remain competitive, and if so, how best to do that. 
3. If your industry will not remain viable, plot your course to change your products and services. 

For employees and professionals, getting back to business means: 

1. Determining whether your skills are going to remain relevant in the age of AI. 
2. If your skills are going to require upgrading, start retraining in an area which is going to survive the AI onslaught, or even thrive in it. 

Easy, peasy. Let’s all stop running around flapping our wings and worrying about whether the sky is falling, like Chicken Little, and instead carry on in a calm and well-reasoned manner to preserve our businesses and our futures. 

The problem with AI is that too many of us are in a tizzy about it, when we should be learning about it and adapting to a world in which it is, unfortunately, going to be ubiquitous. Let’s remember that it stands for “Artificial Intelligence” and not for “Abandoning Intelligence,” which is what way too many people seem to do when they come face to face with it.