Op-Ed: Mismanaging the future: AI chronic underachievement vs human adaptation

Right now, could there be anything easier than being self-righteous about AI? The sheer lack of any sort of higher objectivity is astonishingly stupid.  Discussion is at point-blank range from any event or issue.

Something happened. Something didn’t happen. As a matter of fact, very little has actually happened. At the consumer level, AI has become a Tinker Toy. Fashionable, forgettable, and obsolete in a year.

Meanwhile, a vast knowledge base has been scraped and uploaded at great expense, and that’s it. People are expected to coexist with an infantile level of a technology they don’t really know how to use.

The side effects of this “oblivion for the masses” aren’t hard to find. The net effect of AI on human cognition is generating an ever-growing library of information that nobody’s using at all.

Humanity is either blinking at an asteroid or wondering what this new form of wheel might do. It’s too easy to argue that the pitiful state of human literacy, culture and general knowledge isn’t processing a big picture perspective. It’s going through the picture one pixel at a time as it bumps into the individual pixels.  

Setting the scene for total incomprehension

Let’s drag the carcasses of education and social awareness out of the rubble for a quick survey.

Literacy: Literacy means the ability to understand what you read. Literacy in the West has been tanking for decades thanks to cheapskate budgets and social engineering from political interests. US literacy in particular is truly appalling. Therefore, comprehension starts from a horrendously low base.

Social awareness: In a hyper-stressed social environment, people naturally back away from more stress, particularly from new perceived threats. In a society with any level of credibility as functional, that’d be bad enough. In this ridiculous, nauseating train wreck of a society, it’s just another anxiety generator.

AI savvy or not? How many of these largely illiterate people actually understand AI and how it works?  How many people can spot, let alone critique AI texts and mistakes on any qualitative level? It’s reasonable that people aren’t familiar with AI, but it’s totally irrational that they’re expected to accept AI as a sort of infallible new god.  

In many ways, AI is the new form of “beads and rattles” for the grossly underinformed natives of Earth. It’s shiny, it looks impressive, and the values are whatever someone else tells you they are.

AI underachievement

Just a nice, tolerant header to annoy as many insular people who apparently won’t even admit to themselves that they know a lot better, based on this question:

What is AI actually achieving and why isn’t this question asked constantly?

What does AI deliver?  At Bozo level, many new, obscure, and far more expensive ways of doing exactly the same things with a really good chance of making a mess of them. That’s an achievement? When?

AI decisions, yes or no? It’s an instant excuse for mediocre managers who can’t make decisions without approval from non-existent people like bots. If that sounds like a healthy mindset, get a life. You may need one.

Can AI manage disinformation? Yes and no. In an AI definition of the disinformation problem, it can’t. How’s that for using the problem to explain the problem? It’s unavoidable.  

Realism in productivity? You have been given any number of new, quite useless, and often totally fraudulent misconceptions about work, jobs, and productivity. None of them work. If you replace 100 people with AI, you have at least 100 tasks that still need to be done perfectly by the AI, and the inevitable, uncross-checked failures and their price tags are all yours.

AI dependency, whether you like it or not. How do you escape AI dependency when you have an ever-shrinking range of non-AI options? This goes well beyond the normal “trust factor” into why you aren’t trusting your own judgment. Try that as a bedtime story. This is also Catch 22.123933356978 repeating. You have to think your way out of it.

Human adaptation to AI

OK, enough with the weather report.

Human adaptation to AI is so new it’s a very blurry and particularly thankless subject at the moment. So far, it’s mainly been learning how to do prompts that are less disastrous. Each despairing prompt, however, is defining and refining the needs for adaptation. This is where “blame the AI” can never be an answer.

The limitations of AI are pretty clear. Everyone has now seen an AI or AI agent make a colossal mess of something. These are often mistakes humans simply wouldn’t make, most of the time. AI financial mistakes alone are now common enough to generate a long list of warnings for basic comprehension of their risks.

If adaptation = survival, survival usually equates to risk evaluation. You’re not going to attack the mammoth with your pointy stick because it looks like a really dumb thing to do. You had to learn that. You now have to learn it again.

We are literally in the very start of the Old Stone Age in terms of human adaptation to AI, and the whole ecology of risks has yet to be explored. The AI version of a flint axe can chop through information, but it’s a very rough tool you don’t quite yet know how to use.

What needs to be recognized is that entirely new essential skill sets don’t exist. They can only evolve through adaptation.

This is Square One.