Computer, kill Flanders

There’s a lot of buzz around artificial intelligence. Some people are concerned about losing their jobs to artificial intelligence, some other people are excited about all the attention they get when they talk about how we all will lose our jobs to artificial intelligence. But most people don’t get artificial intelligence, and will dump it as soon as they realize it won’t do as they command: Flanders is still alive.

The last weeks I’ve been seeing how people use artificial intelligence to automate some of their work: writing emails, updating tasks, replying to chats… And that’s a huge mistake. I tried it myself both in personal and work issues, and I think it’s great for documentation (when you want to reference things that are already wrote instead of just copy/paste) and for creating low value text (oriented for search engines and the likes, where you just want to place some keywords).

But using AI to communicate with another human being is thoughtless. How insulted would you fill if you spend some time reading an email apologizing just to discover that the person who sent it put zero effort in it? There’s no intention, it’s cold and void. In few seconds you can generate a text that other human being will take time and effort to read. If I have the slightest suspicion that something was AI generated, I won’t read it.

I understand why any of us would be glad to get rid of some routinary communication, it’s an energy drainer. No wonder how people took the chance and freed themselves from it as soon as they learnt about the AI capacities. But in my humble opinion it’s a huge mistake that may have an unsuspected reaction when a customer feels offended after your lack of respect sending a courtesy email obviously generated by an artificial intelligence, or a coworker skips some details of a task after you didn’t review the AI generated description.

Is not so much that we don’t understand what artificial intelligence does, we don’t understand what WE do.

Writing emails, defining task or coding a piece of software are means to and end. We use tools to improve, automate and allow ourselves to focus in what it’s really important: communication, finding problems and creating solutions. Our creativity, critical thinking and problem-skills can’t be easily replaced (neither does our empathy and our social skills) but we can be assisted with tools that will enhance our capabilities.

I’m confident we’re just at the exploration phase and that we will soon discover new ways of using this toy we’re playing with.