If This, Then That, Except for When…
I’m not saying that “Agentic AI” will “never” replicate all tasks that workers are currently paid to complete, but I strongly suspect that current agents have an extremely limited task scope.
As exhibit A, I submit this podcast episode, in which Agentic AI is sold on the basis of “solving” tasks that have long been solved and for which very few are paid. Seriously: one guy says, “Okay, what else do people do in their jobs? What are other tasks in the economy?” and the response is “Planning a weekend getaway.” FFS. We need to stop “solving” the solved and actually make some semblance of non-gaslit progress.
Here’s the thing. I work with people who are seriously hustling to automate as much as they can. And what I’ve observed is that plenty can be automated, but it doesn’t scale to expectations. Most things are nestled into complex, sometimes intuitively managed workflows that are so exception-ridden that automation attempts fail early. And when the people trying to automated said procedures go back to stakeholders and say, “can we standardize this more” so that the machine can do it, the answers are often a myriad of very reasonably qualified NOs. After all, if it could have been standardized by now, it probably would have been. Not because that makes it fit more easily into a prompt, but because it makes it fit more easily into the work-day-sanity-drain-sequence that all employed humans endure.
We have to stop accepting the simplicity of the AI “if this, then that” sales pitch, when the vast majority of things that get done amend it with “…except when…”
That last point bears repeating: I have had it with AI being sold as if the entire population of working humans has just been too lazy to clean up their act and standardize, systematize, and optimize what they do. It’s as if the snAIk-oil salesmen assume that every tech executive is a hopeless, degenerate coke addict and they’ve chemtrailed the skies with blow. Look, I’ve accrued 20+ years of cynicism I work every day to dismantle — as much as the next person — but one flavor of it I haven’t had much experience with is this idea that most people are lazy, phoning it in, incompetent, and ripe for the AI’s plucking.
So note to the plutocrats, I get what you’re up to. But hey: you have a good lead here. Use it to actually solve unsolved things. Solving the already solved is the same thing as high seas piracy, and things rarely ended well for pirates.
And, P.S., no one takes a smiling Cassandra seriously, Dario, so if you’re going to flood the media landscape with your “warning,” maybe either mean it or get some media training.
Written by Christopher Butler on
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