You can’t spell Craig without AI.
I have recently come to understand that people are using AI for things that my brain already works for me in that way. Over the last 10+ years I have been the AI for companies or business owners I have worked with. Part of this was if I didn’t have an answer or knowledge of the question I could quickly GoogleFu the information. This was me being someone’s Google, you know the meme, “Let me Google that for you” sending them a screenshot of Google results. But the bigger picture to all this is how to troubleshoot or get the information you want. Using your brain to quickly assess the situation, look at all the variables and come to a solid answer or theory based off the data. This is what AI is doing, getting information either from it’s trained data, or using tooling to access the internet. Parsing the data and giving a summary.
I got a real “ah” moment when listening to the podcast My First Million. They had the CEO of IFTTT and he was talking about how he uses AI personally. I had a distinct moment where I was like, my brain already does that for me.
Automation
Being a super computer nerd and self taught programmer, I can confidently say I am an automationist. I have been automating my life with code for more than 10 years. I have so much code on my computer or archived in backups that I can’t even remember all the code for these types of tasks. Some automations are still in place 10 years later. Lots of scraping, parsing or posting code to endpoints. Over the course of me learning automation, I went from a browser based macros to javascript, to PHP, to Python. It’s a skill that takes focus and ability to handle frustrations, road bumps and easily switch gears to a different approach if things get stuck. Then there are things breaking later, so maintenance is required. Once you go through the whole process of learning the skill is totally worth it!
In the AI world automation is pretty much the selling point. You now have any average Joe (or youtuber), that doesn’t know anything about code have the ability to start automating. From the average Joe perspective this is magical! For them AI is some magic tool, and in some cases it is but using a tool you don’t understand might get you some decent results but what’s the cost? The cost are tokens. Any serious AI person is paying either a monthly subscription for x amount of tokens or on a token by token plan. So in reality it’s not really automation it’s spending money on something that could actually have a one time cost. Having AI repeat the same tasks over and over again actually defeats the whole purpose of automation. So I would argue that AI automation isn’t actually automation, it’s paying AI to do something for a skill set you don’t have. Now there is a time and place to pay for skills you don’t possess. But in the case of automation, have the AI write code to automate the process and then eliminate the AI all together. This is the real approach to AI automation. If you need the AI to do additional things that is fine but don’t have it eat tokens for things that can be coded out once. The other problem I have found is AI will make 2-3 mistakes first before it gets it right, this adds additional tokens unnecessarily. Which is why you should eliminate AI as quick as possible in the automation process. Only use it for what it’s good at, processing or summarizing data.
AI Misunderstanding
I have been getting lots of people saying we can have AI do this or that. Most of the time my response is you don’t need AI for that, you can code it out. The gap between computer nerds and normies is getting wider and wider. AI will make this gap larger over time, it’s already happening. Big companies are laying coders off and replacing them with AI agents. This means code is being regurgitated, which not only leads to stagnation and lack of innovation but real people start losing a much needed skill set, coding! People and businesses are using AI in the weirdest ways because they don’t understand what it is and how it works. It’s some magic box. You pay some monthly subscription or per token and something appears to work. Now whether it’s working as intended or has real world repercussions (security bugs or data leaks), these magic box people don’t know, their brain just doesn’t ask these kind of questions.
Just recently there has been buzz on the internet with article headlines of “Sam Altman’s Coworkers Say He Can Barely Code and Misunderstands Basic Machine Learning Concepts”. The CEO of ChatGPT/OpenAI apparently has a magic box complex as well.
Social Impact
We have already seen the impact on society from social media. Young kids development and mental health have all had a huge decline. These aren’t opinions this is real science here. AI is this kind of impact but on steroids! Skill sets will be lost, not just in the work field but in a social environments as well. With AI, information is no longer multi-perspectives from multiple sources, it’s a single bias source. And as more and more people gravitate towards AI and away from information on the internet, truth or objective thinking will start to deteriorate. I would argue that it already has with the up-rise of commercialism on the internet over the last 20 years. For example, Google search only serves up the same regurgitated information over and over again, making it harder and harder to get other perspectives on information or data. What happens when search engines become obsolete and AI is the only single bias source of online information? Maybe a new internet is born?
Final Thoughts
Resist the urge to let AI do everything for you. Treat it more like an assistant or an employee, where you are the boss. Be discipline and keep your skills intact, and don’t be afraid to learn new skills. AI is a great teacher actually. But be conscious that AI is just code, it’s a computer, it doesn’t actually know everything so always verify with outside sources. The real source of knowledge is in humans, who then spread that information across the internet, books, podcast ect. (even though it’s harder and harder to find real information on the internet these days)
Stand up and let your employer or person in charge know swapping out AI for X is really a bad idea, if you have a legit reason for it to be a bad idea. Humans want real people, real humans. People don’t want to interface with a robot, whether it’s via a phone call, a drive thru window or a chat bot. Lastly, if US companies should take one lesson from the past, outsourcing customer service to India or some other country was the worst idea in history. AI isn’t any better, please for the sake of society just don’t do it!