The Future Contradicts the Present

The AI debate has two halves and the people leading it probably see it differently. But if you lay the arguments side by side, they tell two different stories.

The first half is about the partnership between humans and AI. AI supports by taking over annoying routine work and delivers the data that humans then interpret. The story goes: AI delivers, humans decide (mostly, still).

The second half sounds different. Here AI starts acting more independently. It develops strategies and decides on customer offers. The human then still provides “impulses”, he “accompanies” and “refines”. You can tell from the choice of words what has happened. In the first half the human acts as the protagonist, in the second he merely reacts.

The whole thing is a seamless, invisible slide from “AI assists” to “AI takes over”. So slow that you would not even notice, even if you were paying attention.

I think most people have not noticed it either, because the transition is barely one at all, because productivity just keeps improving continuously on the surface. AI implementations work exactly this gradually in practice. First a pilot project, then all the small tasks get handed over. Clear boundaries are drawn and human oversight is in place. The tasks then keep growing, the boundaries shrink and oversight is no longer needed in many places because the trust is there now. At some point the machine does it all and nobody asks about it anymore, because there are more important things to do than worry about what has already been outsourced.

This is not a new pattern. It is the same with every technology that has to fight to establish itself. It starts with the promise of efficiency gains while maintaining full control over the output, whatever form that takes. Because the machine was supposed to be just a tool. The better it does the work, the more the results improve and the whole process gets cheaper too and the question of why a human should still do it simply disappears. The machine takes over and that is just how it is. The human is replaced.

What bothers me about the debate is not that it describes this trajectory. What bothers me is that it does so as if it were the most natural thing in the world. At the start the assurance that humans remain at the center. At the end the matter-of-factness that they no longer do. Both from the same people, without them addressing the contradiction in the slightest.

The reason is that the debate wants to be both things at once. It wants to reassure and excite, say that everything stays as it is and at the same time that everything changes. It wants to reach the manager who is afraid of losing his people and the manager who dreams of cutting his costs. And because it wants both, it says both, without noticing that they do not go together.

Depending on which of the two halves you believed in, but the beginning is meant to work like a sedative and the end is the new reality as the only logical development that everyone went along with.

I prefer the more honest of the two versions. And it goes like this: you cannot predict it and you would do well to say so openly. Strength is describing the options of possible outcomes and their consequences clearly and developing alternatives for people. A discussion that thinks everything through to the end helps everyone. Right now those who expect an honest answer are being fobbed off with two stories that do not fit together and those who notice it are growing in number.