Op-Ed: Archimedes vs AI as displacement of people and ideas creates difficult, expensive issues

If you take the slightest interest in AI, you can spend days wallowing in the sheer verbiage just to be marginally literate. You need to spend some time just keeping track of the terminology. Then you have to try to get some sort of grip on the issues.

If you search Google News for “AI problems”, you get an instant hourly torrent of issues of all shapes and sizes. You also find that every issue involves the world taking the punches on whatever level, not countering them.

A classic case is Anthropic’s report on “threat actors” relating to the misuse and abuse of their baby Claude. This is the existential monster that’s driving the response to AI problems in general.

All the major AI players are now very much on the same page dealing with this very real and ever-diversifying threat. The same issues apply to everything from rogue or strange AI agents to unpredicted AI responses.

The human responses leave a lot to be desired. You could be forgiven for thinking that the resulting cascade of euphemisms equates to either such witticisms as “the solution is the problem” or invaluable platitudes like “the problem is the solution”. Fortunately, our blessedly apathetic mainstream media refuses to understand the issues or address them in any meaningful form. Ignorance really is bliss.

Today’s problems are therefore tomorrow’s solutions?

Ah, no.

Today’s problems are problems until solved, and they’re much bigger than current AI neuroses or strange outcomes. Everyone and everything related to the problems has to respond personally. The human compensatory effort per issue alone is incalculable, and it’s dangerous.

One lousy (or more likely lazy) prompt can generate tales of woe with just a vague idea of the possible collateral damage.

So everything’s just peachy keen. We talk about AI slop. There’s no shortage of human sloppiness, either.

Archimedes, do you have a minute?

Archimedes made a point with the theory of displacement. The snide puns in relation to AI are easy enough to make. The displacement of liquidity in and out of the capital bathtub as AI splashes into the general economy is looking pretty similar. In practice, every element in the dynamic set is displaced by any capital incident. That’s causing more problems than it could ever possibly be worth, and it’s incredibly expensive.

The displacement of people, skills, lives, and ideas, however, is now exponential. It wouldn’t have taken Archimedes long to figure out that the impact velocity of displacement generates more displacement. That’s coming along nicely, too, thanks to the medium of fluid logic sometimes referred to as human reasoning. Intimidated by the tech, management decisions are often purely reactive and usually short-lived. Reactive means you’ve lost the initiative. Your own role has also been displaced by whatever issue. You’re now an AI agent herder. The problems dictate, and it can’t stay like that.

Then there’s the extremely dangerous pretense of literacy in AI. It took about 20 years for digital language to become universal. AI is already delivering a cacophony of communication, and that’s not helping either. This is real-time intellectual displacement at the most fundamental level.

Most people aren’t AI-literate because even the terminology barely exists at any normal conversational level. You need some sort of grip on any language to use it effectively. You bump into it when AI is the issue. You try to deal with it. You can’t really avoid it. Your communication can only be so effective. You’re more likely to see flow charts (yes, they’re back) than a simple How To explanation, let alone hold a useful conversation. At the decision level, that could be lethal.

The plague of AI Illiteracy is its own reward and its own coffin. That’s making the overall situation much worse, as ignorance reproduces itself in hiring and firing and regulatory policies and decisions based on misinterpreted information. There’s also a core fallacy in the workplace, which is displacing more than people and skills. You don’t replace skills with AI. You certainly don’t replace people. You try to mimic them. Even the theory and practice of future human “life” and “work”, (as though the 21^st century acknowledges such trivia) are now substantially directionless thanks to a total misreading of what AI is and what it does and can’t do.

This whole class of technology is creating huge gaps and massive displacements in even the theories of human life paths and basic business. Who does what to fix the daily problems? How do you plan anything, and for what? The whole idea of human life has nowhere to sit in even a soap opera-level context.

We also have two or three entire generations that are permanently broke, economically broken, and thus displaced. AI has come along at just the right time to complicate that disaster with a few more. The Millennials, Gen Z, and Alpha have thereby been altruistically saved forever from materialism, food, housing, and other nuisances. AI has simply masked the original problems. Human life may even become a subject of actual discussion by real people in coming decades. Someone might even have to think about it. Gruesome, isn’t it?

Those theories of human life paths were already looking pretty tacky long before AI. They have effectively already gone extinct since AI. They remain in museums of college debt, dysfunctional career paths, and societal failure, presumably kept for nostalgic reasons. No attempt is being made to deal with any of these issues, even theoretically.

Having displaced and pre-buried future generations, we can now look at the idea of being human in this Whack-a-Mole life model. As the life path becomes a trail of unreliable, miserly breadcrumbs called “income” in some unwanted syntax, we gaze in awe, or more likely disgust, at the outcomes.

Exactly how half-assed can this idiocy get?

Let’s audit the mentality here:

The perceived threat of AI is the unknown.

The real damage is direct or indirect mismanagement.

The great new asset for humanity has become the huge new liability.

Civilizations fall largely due to mismanagement.

Corruption and insanity help with mismanagement; good old-fashioned imbecility, sometimes with a dainty dash of mindless megalomania, does the heavy lifting. You’re not even at that stage. Even an imbecile can at least claim to participate. To mismanage, you have to at least be able to pretend to be managing. It’s questionable whether proper management tools even exist at ground level. You’re often chasing AI agents, far more so than “managing” them.

The likely outcomes are all about the myriad forms of AI oversight in some form. These outcomes will be:

A generation of “fixers” attached to each and every AI operation.

A generation of professional apologists for each and every AI operation.

A lost economy trying to pay for things with money it may never have.

A transient and highly mobile workforce, based entirely on job insecurity and looking after its own interests at the expense of all other considerations.

A minimization of revenue outcomes due to risk aversion and avoidance.

AI and humans are an unbelievably lousy fit for each other at the moment on a dollar-by-dollar basis.

To un-displace the entire human race, you need good fits.  You also need good people and good AI.

Any questions?