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The 3 AI Use Cases: Gods, Interns, and Cogs

Learning how to use AI will become a skill that everyone needs to acquire, much like literacy. No one asks if you can read during a job interview; it's assumed that by the time you’ve reached that stage, the skill is a given. However, we all have different levels of reading proficiency, which significantly affects how we navigate the world. The same will apply to using AI.

I use AI to automate some of the more mundane tasks I perform, such as constructing this newsletter. However, because I care deeply about the words I put out into the world, I write every word myself. AI has many use cases, but it won't do everything. It's up to you to decide how you want to incorporate it into your life, which is why it’s so important to understand the different ways AI can be used.

After plenty of discussions and tons of exploration, I think we can simplify the world of AI use cases into three simple, distinct buckets:

1. Gods: Super-intelligent, artificial entities that do things autonomously.

2. Interns: Supervised copilots that collaborate with experts, focusing on grunt work.

3. Cogs: Functions optimized to perform a single task extremely well, usually as part of a pipeline or interface.

Why Tech Bros Overestimate AI's Creative Abilities

While I find AI incredibly useful, it's important to acknowledge its limitations. Algorithms do not think; they are imbued with biases and are only as knowledgeable as the quality of the data they have been trained on. AI excels at assembling ideas in ways that humans might overlook, but this is not the same as creativity. We can harness AI to unlock creative potential, and AI can weave its data sets into genuinely creative outputs; however, these are not the same. When we see a computer that appears to be acting creatively, it's not surprising that we may overestimate the creativity AI itself possesses, and that's something we need to watch out for.

A favorite example, which I sadly can no longer find, was an excited techie who’d asked ChatGPT (or maybe it was Claude) to solve philosophy’s famous "trolley problem" and had his mind blown when it gave a (to him) entirely convincing answer. Of course, to someone with an even modest philosophy background, ChatGPT (or maybe it was Claude) had done no such thing. Instead, it regurgitated one of the many canonical answers to the problem, without acknowledging that significant counter-arguments exist, or that this particular canonical answer was just one among many. In other words, it hadn’t solved the trolley problem so much as it had concocted prose that sounded like an answer to someone who had never before seen what sophisticated trolley problem arguments look like.

Will AI Automate Away Your Job?

AI is considered a general technology — a technology with numerous diverse applications, making it challenging to categorize, much like the computer, fire, or electricity. There is no debate that AI will have a significant impact on the world. However, the greater the impact, the more difficult it is to predict, especially in these early days we are left asking what that will mean for people.

Even the world's best economists debate what will happen. Some think we are a decade away from automating many jobs, while others believe we will start to see the impacts this year or next. As a software developer, I tend to think we are closer to a year or two than a decade, but that the change won't be evenly distributed or happen all at once. I believe that every job will be infused with AI, and AI will transform how we do all work. There will be new jobs being created along the way, but they will not necessarily replace all the ones that came before them.

Regardless of when it happens, the most important thing for us to do is to start planning for a different future, because the future is coming and will arrive in our lifetimes. This article provides a really interesting look into which jobs may be automated first and why, based not on the results of work but on the economic reality of how work is done.

In Silicon Valley, where I live and where the cutting edge of AI development is found, the graphs people are paying attention to are the changes in the lengths of time an AI agent can complete autonomously. This represents how long the technology can—like a good employee—operate without external intervention. It’s shorthand for self-directed work.

The key idea where the American worker is concerned is that your job is as automatable as the smallest, fully self-contained task is. For example, call center jobs might be (and are!) very vulnerable to automation, as they consist of a day of 10- to 20-minute or so tasks stacked back-to-back. Ditto for many forms of many types of freelancer services, or paralegals drafting contracts, or journalists rewriting articles.

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AI as Normal Technology

I'm still working my way through this very long paper, which presents a meaningfully different perspective on AI. While the authors view AI as a tremendous innovation, they also argue that it will take longer for AI to proliferate through our society than people expect, myself included. I'm somewhat convinced by their argument, particularly when I think of the Bill Gates quote: "We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten." However, I also strongly believe that this change will be so transformative that we can't even imagine the use cases that will develop—and those will catch us off guard as they begin transforming the world around us.