The Intelligence is Artificial

Have you contacted customer service lately? Have you noticed that it’s becoming more difficult to tell if the chat is a bot or a human? Maybe you’ve tried shouting “HUMAN!!!” into the automated answering service until the system malfunctions and sends you to some poor soul in a call center and then that person is so ill-equipped to fix your issue that it’s not an improvement over the bot or answering service you were previously connected to. Welcome to the future.

We all intuitively know that AI will not be able to replace humans. After all, the intelligence is artificial. It’s not real. It’s merely a mirage of intelligence, convincing those lacking discernment that it is real. This isn’t dissimilar from the people you work with who seem to be constantly promoted and respected by leadership, but who can’t actually perform. The large language models we call AI are those coworkers. Sure, they help solve some problems and answer incoming questions to an acceptable degree to those who lack the expertise to know the difference, but eventually their work comes crashing down to be fixed by those with real competencies. It would have been easier to do it right the first time, but those making that decision, as referenced above, lack the discernment.

Like that coworker, AI will still be there when you’re laid off, but not because AI attended all of the Zoom happy hours. Instead, AI will be cheaper. AI will provide shareholder value and increase executive bonuses. AI will never get your order right at the fast food window, build applications that aren’t infuriating to use, or design airplanes that don’t have panels flying off mid-air. But AI will do it cheaper.