Great News, AI Will Replace You

Thanks to Tetyana Karpenko , I have a relevant and timely answer to the burning question of the year. Will AI replace me? The short answer is yes. The complicated answer is yes, but … not really.

Bottom line for most people: AI represents some ooky spooky tech wizardry that makes decisions and creates content faster and often better than them. A big scary black box that threatens to write their emails, answer customer service calls, and eventually replace what they do. For people in the industry Artificial Intelligence represents some ooky spooky machine learning coupled with custom designed GCPU networks, specialized software, neural nets, large language models, and a lot of painstaking, backbreaking human effort to get small incremental improvements. A black box we mostly understand depending on the depth of our expertise and specialization.

While chatting on a radio show about my PhD in Indigenous Resource Management it struck me that we humans have done one thing well for the last 65,000 years. Definitional really, of civilization itself. We think. Laterally intuitively critical. A skill which cannot be replaced by AI. AI can do anything routine faster and better than humans. It spots patterns, write cover letters, can spot flaws in corn cobs and transistors, perform surgery, or play the piano with far more precision and focus than a human being. But it lacks passion, lacks intuition, lacks the ability to grasp entire patterns, make sudden inspirational connections between dissimilar ideas. It cannot think. It can only mimic thinking.

Which brings us to the question: will AI replace us? For any activity that requires the illusion of thinking, sure. Most of customer service and email writing needs to follow a certain format, obey certain rules, follow an ever-branching social script. But it’s not critical thinking. In the same way we don’t need travel agents to book a basic cruise or flight now that online websites exist, AI will extinguish all the low level jobs and functions that are merely scripted.

Which leaves all the really juicy problematic jobs and chores for humanity. ChatGPT4 and its ilk can code for you. But it can’t decide what program to create, what problem to solve, where, when and how it should be deployed. Those are critical decisions that require human agency , which cannot be fulfilled by AI. Not as it works today and unlikely for another decade or two. So yes, your job is going away. All the junk work you use to do, all the low value, scripted BS we turn into careers? Useless and better achieved by machines.

All the amazing things only people know how to do? That will remain. In my field that means no one needs me to write bid content or scan documents for GDPR infractions or even scan a cloud ecosystem design for load balancing optimization. Machines and specialists using them can do that far better. But influencing decision makers, thinking through new products, mentoring teams, creating new functionalities that solve unspoken problems – those remain huge opportunities for me, for people like me, and of course, for anyone who has just been replaced by a machine.