AI: Sucking Value from Those with Soft Skills
April 21, 2023
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
I read an essay called “Beyond Algorithms: Skills Of Designers That AI Can’t Replicate.” The author has a specific type of expertise. The write up explains that his unique human capabilities cannot be replicated in smart software.
I noted this somewhat poignant passage:
Being designerly takes thinking, feeling, and acting like a designer…. I used the head, heart, and hands approach for transformative sustainability learning (Orr, Sipos, et al.) to organize these designerly skills related to thinking (head), feeling (heart), and doing (hands), and offer ways to practice them.
News flash: Those who can use smart software to cut costs and get good enough outputs from smart software don’t understand “designerly.”
I have seen lawyers in meeting perspire when I described methods for identifying relevant sections of information from content sucked into as part of the discovery process. Why memorize Bates number 525 when a computing device provides that information in an explicit form. Zippy zip. The fear, in my experience, is that lawyers often have degrees in history or political science, skipped calculus, and took golf instead of computer science. The same may be said of most knowledge workers.
The idea is that a human has “knowledge value,” a nifty phrase cooked up by Taichi Sakaiya in his MITI-infused book The Knowledge Value Revolution or a History of the Future.
The author of the essay perceives his designing skill as having knowledge value. Indeed his expertise has value to himself. However, the evolving world of smart software is not interested in humanoids’ knowledge value. Software is a way to reduce costs and increase efficiency.
The “good enough” facet of the smart software revolution de-values what makes the designer’s skill generate approbation, good looking stuff, and cash.
No more. The AI boomlet eliminates the need to pay in time and resources for what a human with expertise can do. As soon as software gets close enough to average, that’s the end of the need for soft excellence. Yes, that means lots of attorneys will have an opportunity to study new things via YouTube videos. Journalists, consultants, and pundits without personality will be kneecapped.
Who will thrive? The answer is in the phrase “the 10X engineer.” The idea is that a person with specific technical skills to create something like an enhancement to AI will be the alpha professional. The vanilla engineer will find himself, herself, or itself sitting in Starbucks watching TikToks.
The present technology elite will break into two segments: The true elite and the serf elite. What’s that mean for today’s professionals who are not coding transformers? Those folks will have a chance to meet new friends when sharing a Starbucks’ table.
Forget creativity. Think cheaper, not better.
Stephen E Arnold, April 21, 2023
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
