The AI Denial Train Should Stop
Steve Andriole
Author: The Digital Playbook-How to Win the Strategic Technology Game
There’s a chorus of “thought leaders” arguing that AI will not replace
managers. The Harvard Business Review is leading the charge with a suite
of articles that insist that AI will not replace human decision-makers and
that AI “will enable knowledge workers to concentrate on value-adding
activities where human expertise is indispensable” (Senz, 2023). De
Cremer and Kasparov (2021) argue that “AI should augment human
intelligence, not replace it.” Martela and Luoma (2021) flat out declare
that “AI will never replace managers” because humans are better at
“reframing” problems than machines – at least for now. Other papers
in HBR suggest that too much focus on AI can actually cause “more
problems than it’s solving” (Acar, 2024), and Shrier (2023) describes the
jobs most and least affected by AI with the simple title “is your job AI
resilient?” Finally, Lakhani (2023) argues that “AI won’t replace humans –
but humans with AI will replace humans without AI. The general
conclusion is that humans and their uniqueness need not worry too much
about losing their jobs to algorithms, and that AI will remain assistants
rather than partners and certainly not bosses – which is like deciding that
an employee will remain in his or her job forever no matter how well he or
she performs.
Thought Leaders Make Mistakes
What if the thought leaders are wrong? There’s no guarantee that they’re
right, is there? There have been many cases in technology history where
pundits got it wrong. Thought leaders and pundits missed the impact social
media would have on communications, activism and commerce. They failed
to see the collapse of Internet business models. They missed the decline of
the EV market we’re experiencing right now, and let’s not forget the
Metaverse, Google Glass, self-driving cars, NFTs and the adoption of VR
and AR.
Here are some especially amusing ones over the years that Gemini told me
about:
"The internet will collapse" (1995): Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet,
famously declared the internet would implode. Thankfully, he later ate his
words.
"Nobody needs a computer in their home" (1977): Ken Olsen, founder of
Digital Equipment Corp (DEC), couldn't see the potential for personal
computers. DEC is a footnote in history now
"Mobile phones will absolutely never replace wired phones" (1998): Marty
Cooper, who invented the mobile phone, ironically underestimated its
disruptive potential.
"Television won't last. People will soon get tired of staring at a box every
night" (1946): Darryl Zanuck, head of 20th Century Fox, completely missed
the power of television as a medium.
"Video games will not change the way we interact with computers and will
not affect the computer hobbyist market" (1975): Hobbyists' magazine
Popular Electronics completely whiffed on the future dominance of video
games.
"Nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners will be in every home by 1995" (1955):
Alex Lewyt, a vacuum cleaner company CEO, made this outlandish (and
frankly dangerous) prediction.”
Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma (1997) is a tour deforce of how
reality can escape companies that should know better.
So it’s possible that the “AI-will-not-take-your-job” crowd is very wrong.
But how wrong could they be? Far be it from me to argue
with HBR’s general take on AI’s role in business problem-solving and
decision-making, there’s another way to look at the power of AI and the
impact it will have on the knowledge professions: AI will displace many
more knowledge workers than anyone believes is possible, which is easily as
possible as AI-will-not-take-your-job assurances.
Let’s Assume They’re Wrong
So what if the thought leaders are wrong? The Harvard Business Review is
full of reassurance. The journal’s insistence that AI will not replace
managers is dangerously reassuring. What if AI is destined to obliterate
knowledge workers and thoroughly and utterly replace them in even so-
called high-value decision-making? Let’s remember that “AI” (machine
learning and especially generative AI) is very new. We’re at step one of a ten
step journey where the 10th step is always moving. No one knows how this
will end, except that it won’t – which is why judgements about which jobs
are resilient and which aren’t today are by definition misleading. How could
thought leaders possibly know the power of AI ten or twenty years from
now or what professions – many of which have yet to be invented – will
grow, shrink or disappear altogether?
Ideally, we base short-term predictions on defined processes and the power
of AI today with just a little extrapolation about future power. This is safe
territory for pundits. Opining about anything based upon general principles
— like humans have unique problem-solving capabilities that AI can never
replace — is wrong. We just don’t know if such principles will persist.
Domains & Timing
It’s impossible to talk about the role that AI will play without segmentation.
We need a matrix of domains and timelines. Some domains – like medical
imaging – will yield to machine learning and generative AI faster than
others. Which are which? The nature of problems and work must also be
specified. Well-bounded domains – regardless of their complexity – are all
fair game.
Gemini tells us that “generative AI ... excels in tasks that involve creating
new data, often creative in nature. Here are some problem domains where
generative AI shines: image and video generation, content creation, data
augmentation and drug discovery.”
I recently made the argument that higher education and the staff that
enables it are all in the crosshairs of AI. These “predictions” are based upon
the tasks that professors and students perform to “learn” – the domain of
higher education explained around processes that are – today –
particularly amenable to AI tools. Higher education is not the only
vulnerable domain. Domains with similar well-bounded processes are also
targets.
Stop the Reassurance
It’s time to stop reassuring ourselves about what AI will not replace. If the
technology trends are any indication of impact, machine learning and
generative AI are far more likely to replace than preserve knowledge
workers. It will take some time for this prediction to be validated or
rejected, but arguments that AI has limits and that humans are uniquely
qualified to make certain decisions are wrong. While it’s impossible to
know what happens in ten years, we can be sure that machine learning and
generative AI will replace a growing number of knowledge workers in the
next three to five years. Probably more than we imagine.
[Source: Forbes]
