Two out of every three posts in my LinkedIn feed are about AI. They’re breathless, flashing, loud, urgent even. They shout how awesome it is. About the amazing stuff it’s building. About how if you’re not automating everything from your calendar to your email, your dinner plans, and your interactions with your kids, your missing out, being left behind.
But as I glance across the road at the newly harvested cornfield beyond, I am reminded that the more the world changes, the more it stays the same.
Because the “real” stories are starting to slip into my feed too. The ones where a manager’s agent deleted their entire inbox, where a grocery chain’s entire frozen food supply rotted while workers looked on helplessly because “AI” hacked into and shut down all of their freezers. About tech companies whose AI bots wrote the requirements for their offshore team, who promptly coded it, and then discovered the requirements were wrong. When was the last time you did a Google search and actually found what you were looking for on the first page? What about on Amazon? How’s your GPS working lately? How long does it take for your bank’s logon screen to finally load and let you into your account?
It turns out that even with super “smart” computers, you can’t successfully automate a deliverable if you don’t actually know the process that makes it work. This might sound like sour grapes, and maybe there’s a bit of that in this post, but I feel like someone needs to point out the obvious; We fired, forced out, laid off, or otherwise marginalized all of the people that help us understand how things work, why we do them the way we do, and what makes it all hold together and then watched in shock as the world around us came crashing down. I mean, really, what did we expect to happen? I’m certainly not the only person who predicted this result … right?
Sigh. When the heady buzz dies off, when we all come down off this artificial high, and we finally realize that solving real problems for human beings and society as a whole still requires the ability to talk to each other, to understand the steps in a process and why they occur, to empathize, and to work together toward common goals, us “glue roles” will be here ready and waiting to help put the world back together again.
I just have one simple request. Before we jump into fix-it mode, let’s take a bit of time to think on how we ended up in this situation. What made us all decide to jump on this clearly unsteady and wildly out of control bandwagon? What made us look at this situation and say, yes, the snake oil salesmen at the wheel of this jalopy clearly had our best interests at heart? And what will we do differently the next time those same fraudsters roll into town in that same black-smoke belching clunker with a new panacea, but now wrapped in a fine new suit paid for by our own pain and suffering?
