“A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.”
I wanted to write something down for quite some time about the current state of AI and the buzz around it. After thinking about & using it for quite some time now, i just wanted to share my view on the matter.
The quote above comes from an internal IBM training document written in 1979, at a moment when computers were just beginning to shape the modern world. Nearly half a century later, computers and microprocessors have quietly permeated almost every aspect of life, reliably automating countless big and small tasks. In aggregate, I believe this technological evolution has largely been a force for good.
But if you look closely, we rarely see computer having the final call or ever seenthem being involved of running companies or being at trial for their mistakes. Public transport, planes, cars, computers - all of these examples still have humans behind the wheel. Not because we couldn’t automate it sufficiently, but because in case something goes wrong, we simply can’t accept the fact a machine had the last touchpoint before failure. I personally believe, that won’t change anytime soon, or ever.
People are claiming that certain jobs are over, “XYZ is DEAD”, they shout! But these people are just noise, most of the time, people with little technological understanding or a lack judgement (or an conflicting interest by promoting their solution). It should be by no-ones surprise, that people proclaim their solution will replace XYZ job.
On the other day i watched a video that made an interesting distinction i have not yet done: AI might be automating tasks in the future, but jobs come along not with a list of tasks, they usually come with assessing situations and applying judgement on how to deal with them, sometimes within a defined path, but sometimes off any description or playbook defined by the business. Sometimes action is preceded by definition, and those who take that action, take the accountability.
While i think AI is making us more productive in removing the annoyance of doing small tasks, writing text that sometimes always comes in the same shape, it won’t replace judgement and vision, it won’t replace the accountability that comes with that and the backbone and guts to stay true to that. If Henry Ford would have asked ChatGPT in his era, it would have advised him to give the people faster horses. Sometimes the most statistical likely answer isn’t the “right one”, because humanity does not constrain itself to just the most statistical version of it, it comes in many shapes and sizes, so there is never really a perfect answer.
I don’t think AI will be able to replace this anytime soon and even if it eventually be so smart to consider this all, there will still be a human at the other end to confirm - and that is hopefully further in the future.
I still think AI is causing people to be able to do more by themselves, and because of this some headcount is simply not required anymore. But i don’t think AI is here to replace jobs, because people can only really take on that much accountability before having to offload it to someone else, who’s judgement they can trust.