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Tag: AI

  • The Non-Technical Economy

    The Non-Technical Economy

    It seems that everything these days is about AI and how the world as we know it will end. Some are prophesying that entire swaths of our economy will be replaced by AI. Writers are lining up on both sides of the argument. As IT professionals, much has been written (or assumed) about the use of AI in IT.

    In 2019, Brian Merchant wrote, “A robot is not ‘coming for’, or ‘stealing’ or ‘killing’ or ‘threatening’ to take away your job. Management is.” Is that true?

    While most people are focusing on those things that AI can do to replace human work, there are a significant number of things that AI can’t do better than humans. Interestingly, I asked AI (i.e., MS CoPilot) for a list of things that humans do better. Here’s the list:

    1. Emotional Intelligence: Humans are naturally equipped with the ability to understand, interpret, and respond to emotions in a way that AI cannot. This includes empathy, compassion, and the ability to read subtle social cues, which are essential for meaningful human interactions.
    2. Creativity and Innovation: While AI can generate new content based on existing data, humans have the innate ability to think outside the box, imagine completely new concepts, and create innovative solutions to problems.
    3. Ethical and Moral Judgment: Humans can navigate complex ethical dilemmas and make decisions based on a nuanced understanding of morality, societal norms, and personal values. AI lacks the consciousness to make such judgments.
    4. Adaptability and Flexibility: Humans can easily adapt to new situations, learn from diverse experiences, and apply knowledge in various contexts. AI systems, on the other hand, can struggle with tasks that deviate from their training data or require adaptation to new environments.
    5. Complex Problem-Solving: Humans are capable of solving poorly defined or novel problems that require intuition, judgment, and the ability to find connections between seemingly unrelated information. AI systems are typically limited to solving algorithmic problems and can struggle with tasks that cannot be systematically defined.
    6. Physical Dexterity and Mobility: Humans have fine motor skills and the ability to navigate complex physical environments, which are challenging for AI and robotics to replicate with the same level of proficiency.
    7. Interpersonal Skills: The ability to build relationships, collaborate effectively, and navigate social networks is a distinctly human trait. AI can assist with communication but cannot fully replicate the depth of human interaction.
    8. Learning from Limited Data: Humans can learn new skills or understand new concepts from a few examples, whereas AI often requires large datasets to learn effectively.
    9. Understanding Context and Nuance: Humans excel at understanding context, sarcasm, irony, and nuanced language, which can be challenging for AI to interpret correctly.

    It’s important to recognize that AI is a tool designed to augment human abilities, not replace them. The collaboration between human intelligence and AI has the potential to enhance productivity and innovation across various fields.

    What’s interesting about this list is that most of these skills are closely related to those needed to provide excellent IT service management. As the emphasis in IT has grown over the last three decades from technical to customer-service competencies, the identification of these soft skills has been one of the ways the profession has defined and delineated itself. Take, for example, the list of skills necessary to provide excellent service desk support (ITIL4 Foundation Training, 2024):

    • Customer service
    • Empathy
    • Incident analysis and prioritization
    • Effective communication
    • Emotional Intelligence

    It would appear, at least at this moment in time, that AI will not be able to do some of the fundamental things we do in IT service management. Indeed, a survey of those industries most susceptible to “takeover” by AI include manufacturing, finance, healthcare, cybersecurity, and education. Note that these fields don’t rely heavily on stakeholder interactions to be effective.

    So why are “managers” still trying to replace us? I think the answer is that they are thinking in a binary way – either we use AI to do work or we use humans. The real answer is that AI will augment and complement humans in IT service management, not replace them. The collaboration between human intelligence and AI has the potential to enhance productivity and innovation across various fields. This is reflected in the newest ITIL4 Create, Deliver, Support curriculum which stresses the effective integration of AI, among other tools. Mature IT Managers will realize that AI is a tool that can automate steps of the value stream, but at the end of the day, customers will have better outcomes and realize more value if humans are left to do what humans do best.

  • Van Halen Breaks AI

    Van Halen Breaks AI

    I’m a huge Spotify fan. As a GenX’er, I love ’80s arena rock – Queen, Van Halen, AC/DC, Journey, Yes – you get the picture. Spotify feeds my hard rock nostalgia hunger. Spotify released a new feature earlier this year called DJ that is essentially an AI bot that examines your musical tastes and curates sets based upon them, including new selections it thinks you may like. According to Spotify, “The DJ knows you and your music taste so well that it will scan the latest releases we know you’ll like, or take you back to that nostalgic playlist you had on repeat last year.”

    After using DJ for some time, I can attest that it’s pretty good at creating sets of my favorites but pretty bad at selecting new music. For example, I can’t stand Rap, but it keeps setting me up with Rap/Hip-Hop sets which I quickly fast-forward through. DJ doesn’t seem to think fast-forwarding is disapprobation, so after a few songs, I finally get fed up and hit the “DJ” button to explicitly show my displeasure. It makes me wonder if they are selling plays of those artists which would explain why they keep pushing genres that the AI should know I don’t like.

    Several weeks ago, DJ selected a Van Halen song from their album 1984. The song was the instrumental first track on the album. Now, I had that record on vinyl when I was a kid. I know every lyric, every note, every riff. So when I heard the instrumental track 1984, I was expecting to also hear the second track on the album, Jump. I’ve always considered 1984 as an instrumental prelude to Jump. This is a “by design” artifact of “album rock” that creates associations and meaning out of the order tracks are set on the album. If you doubt me, take a look at Pink Floyd The Wall. Other examples of instrumental preludes include Yes’ Cinema (followed by Leave It) on their 90125 album and Queen’s We Will Rock You (We Are the Champions) from their album News of the World. Regarding this last example, I always get irritated when radio stations play We Will Rock You by itself. In the 80s and 90s, they would ALWAYS play them together. Somewhere along the road, radio media forgot this tacit knowledge and wisdom.

    And here’s the point. When I heard 1984, I let it run expecting Jump to play next, but it never came. Because I let it run, in subsequent weeks, DJ kept serving that song solo, aggravating me all the more. Why didn’t DJ know that those two songs were supposed to be together? Because AI doesn’t understand tacit knowledge. Van Halen had “broken” AI.

    AI will never be able to recreate the beautiful complexity of learning through living in the world with all of the experiences – personal, communal, cultural, and national – that come with it. This is why I don’t think AI is as far along as some would have us believe. Some folks agree with me. While AI may be helpful in many contexts, I don’t think it will ever replace the complexity of human reason completely.