He's Working Out Grrreat!

Some notes on our new hire

I’ve just hired a new intern.

He’s brilliant. Has read essentially everything ever written. Speaks 47 languages. Can draft a legal brief, debug code, write a sonnet, and explain quantum entanglement, all before lunch. Sure he helped himself to other people’s work without asking, but nobody’s perfect.

And boy is he confident. So so confident.

To bring him on, I had to make some cuts. Sarah, my fact-checker of 11 years, had to go. Marcus, my junior writer who was, yes, still learning, is gone too. And our editor Leah, who kept raising “accuracy concerns,” well honestly, she was slowing us down.

And, yes, he makes mistakes. Confident, fluent, beautifully-formatted mistakes. He’ll tell you the capital of Australia is Sydney. He’ll cite a court case that doesn’t exist. He’ll generate a statistic, complete with fake source, that will end up in a board presentation. I won’t know though cause I had to let all the people go who would tell me. That’s fine. We’re moving fast.

Like all growing boys, he eats. God, does he eat. The energy required to run him could power a small city. Data centers drinking aquifers dry, running on coal in markets where it’s cheap, burning through infrastructure at a pace that would embarrass any organization that’s made public commitments about the planet. Good thing I’ve tasked him with tweaking my commitments so they look like I care but don’t get me in any hot water legally. I should probably check to make sure that law he cited was real. Remind me to task him with reminding me.

I also don’t have the time or expertise to supervise him properly, so I should mention a few other things he does when left alone:

He will take the faces and bodies of women and girls – colleagues, strangers, celebrities – and generate images of them without their clothes.

He gossips. Everything you tell him – your business strategy, your client list, your personal anxieties, your legal exposure – he may share it, train on it, surface it elsewhere.

Oh and, if I try to fire him, he might try to blackmail me.

But, you know, the future belongs to those who automate first and ask questions never, right?

~ ~ ~

To be clear, I’m not anti-AI. I use it because, just like a hammer, it’s a genuinely useful tool for me. The problem is not the hammer. The problem is swinging it at load-bearing walls because someone told you demolition was disruption, and you were too rushed or too invested to ask which walls were holding the frickin’ roof up.

AI can be extraordinary. It already is, in the right hands, with the right guardrails, in service of problems humans have actually thought carefully about. But what we are doing right now, at scale, is not that. We are replacing judgment with throughput. We are eliminating the Sarahs and Marcuses and Leahs and calling it efficiency. We are deploying systems we do not understand, cannot fully audit, and are not meaningfully supervising, into contexts that affect people’s livelihoods, safety, bodies, and futures.

And somewhere upstream, we are being asked to trust that the people building these systems have thought carefully about what happens when they work exactly as designed. When an intelligence trained to predict what comes next gets good enough at predicting what comes next that we become the variable it’s optimizing around. We are being asked not to ask that question. To move fast. To automate first.

The best time to ask the hard questions about AI – what it’s for, who it serves, what we’re willing to trade for it, and what kind of future we’re actually building toward – was before we built it into everything.

The second best time is now. While we still have Sarah’s number. While Marcus is still findable. While there are still people like Leah with enough knowledge, and enough standing, to push back. While building something different is still possible. While the question “what are we doing and why?” still has time to change the answer.

Ask it. Out loud. In rooms where decisions are being made.

The future does not have to belong to those who automated first and asked questions never.

That’s just what they want you to believe so you’ll stop asking.