Conflicting AI News

The news is INSANE!

I think we, as in the world, are very close to hitting the trifecta of crises:

• AI dominated world leading to potentially devastating employment picture;
• Upheaval and restlessness due to political/religious/oligarchic battles or just wars popping up everywhere;
• Climate disasters

Yes, the second bullet point is pretty vague, but I don’t know what will drive the upheavals. There are so many sources of tension that all of them may play a role.

Right now, we have a war going on (actually maybe 3 – 1) Gaza technically under ceasefire but fragile; 2) Ukraine/Russia war; 3) and now Iran war) and I’m not going to focus on that today because it is not my main purpose. Although I will say it does not look like it is going well for the President and shows signs of possibly expanding. Well, it is expanding but it could become very dangerous.

No, I’m going to stick to AI because that alone is dystopian enough without adding the potential climate disasters (some days in March has been unusually warm; southern California had triple digits sometime last week) and the threat of war turning into nuclear battle.

News version 1: jobs will be wiped out

Either this morning or yesterday, I read an article about a study done by Cognizant where the researchers re-assessed their findings on how rapidly AI will spread through the corporate world.

The authors of the study were shocked at how rapidly AI had advanced during the last 3 years. So, they upped the percentage and changed the timeframe of the pending doom.

Now they think about 93% of the jobs will be disrupted – not necessarily completely taken over.

Then there are the weekly layoff announcements with the purported cause being AI driven efficiencies

And, we already have the entry level jobs being kicked off the career ladder because those are the types of jobs that AI supposedly can do. Employment statistics seem to bear out the idea that new graduates are having a harder time finding their first position.

Finally, there is an ongoing brouhaha in the coding sector that Anthropic Claude Code is causing angst amongst the software industry. Supposedly Claude Code is capable of developing programs very rapidly with little problems. The SaaS (software as service) industry saw the stock market decline upon Anthropic’s announcement about Claude Code.

But, news version 2: AI can’t be fully depended upon

Yet, everyday there is an article depicting the issues of using AI

• hallucinations have never been resolved and that’s still an issue;
• companies are AI washing to hide the fact that they hired too aggressively during the pandemic;
• codes still break: Amazon had 4 retail outages last week supposedly due to AI coding and Meta today had some kind of data breach due to AI making some kind of suggestion.

And then I look at data for finance/FP&A departments: not many have taken up AI yet. Certainly not generative AI due to the concern for confidentiality and privacy.

So, what can we do?

We can’t say, “It’s not happening” because the AI genie is already out of the bag. It’s out there and the competitive business environment is forcing behaviors to continue to grab AI market share to forestall “winners take all”. US executives say we can’t let China get ahead of us and I’m sure China is thinking “we can let US get ahead of us”.

The best we can do is stay plugged into the business world and the AI world.

The business world is necessary so you can be on top of where and how businesses are using AI. In finance departments, there’s not much use, but I would want to know when the uptake starts to take hold, especially if my company is not using it.

You also want to stay plugged into how AI is progressing, so you understand what is being developed. We need to understand how we can potentially use the technology. Also, we need to understand the dangers and weaknesses of the technology. Lately, there have been news articles where those who use generative AI the most, maybe every day, are in danger of having their mental cognition declining.

Yes, our critical thinking skills are at risk of degrading. Although, I would say, we already have problems with critical thinking skills, based upon my work experience.

The other thing we can do, besides staying plugged in, is to keep our thinking and problem-solving skills sharp. That means figuring out how to use AI without it doing all of the work. Maybe instead of it writing up your entire article, you do an initial draft and have it proofread your writing and maybe provide suggestions for improvement.

So keep plugged into the business world and the AI industry, keep your critical thinking skills sharp and finally, keep playing with AI to gain an intuitive feel for how it works.

Lastly, I just finished vibe coding!

Before I end today’s post, let me briefly go on a tangent and say that I finally got the program produced by the AI to work. I will have to do a post on some lessons learned on how to do “vibe coding” – my bastardized version.