Humans do activities, machines do processes, & AI..?

With the dawn of Artificial Intelligence 25 years after I began in earnest to design software-based services I’m reminded of where I started and why my enthusiasm remains high.

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In reference to the title above, yes of course humans can do processes - we are forced to every day! But we do not do them well, not nearly as well as machines. And neither should we — we are simply not optimised for the levels of isolation required to achieve perfection of repetition.

Regardless of tens of thousands of hours of study and practise the most rigorous and talented of us may become concert musicians or olympic athletes, yet none can reproduce a performance exactly the same every time. We can’t even brush our teeth the same way after a lifetime of doing it twice or more a day. We can follow a process to assemble the IKEA shelves, but do not expect us to do it the same every time.

This is because we are alive, we are in any moment a composite reaction to all things around us. Any and all action we take is complicit with a situation that has never existed before and will never exist again.

This is in total contrast to machines that are not alive, are not at all in concert with much, and are truly isolated. Consequently performing a series of actions exactly the same over and over is the thing they do.

Artificial intelligence concerns us because it seems to threaten us with a convergence of these two divergent capabilities. Although identifiable in the first instance to us as a machine it introduces a variance to exacting repetition based on progressive self-learning. In this way it does not blindly bang away on the process drum repeating itself over and over again. It evolves its repetitive behaviour as a consequence of limited external factors to optimise the process it performs, such as generating speech.

It is easy to fear this human-like behaviour … but is it human-like?

Perfection of a process is not a human capability — by definition it requires repetition to an exacting standard as a foundation. We always utilise machinery to undertake high quality process repetition. AI is machine-like, requiring precise repetition as a foundation upon which its own optimisations - can modify its own behaviour.

It of course can still be threatening. But that is precisely where I started all those years ago…

In order to use computer software I was being treated as a machine myself… click this button, enter this value, click this button, click and hold, select the list item, click the button… task completed successfully — now do it again for the next one, and again, and…(!). Many requisite work tasks requiring hundreds of actions like these in a perfect sequence every time.

I saw enormous peer and societal kudos being awarded to people who could act like a machine and perform feats of exacting repetition…
- computer gaming: lightning fast repetitive action through the same routines …over and over again!;
- information recall: read this research paper, remember and recall page 83 perfectly ...whenever asked!;
- step by step routines: talk the caller through the script exactly as written, smile as you talk (even though they can’t see you), capture their explicit yes or no answer. Then repeat with the next caller …you must complete 50 a day minimum!.

But… this all clearly and dramatically threatens what it is to be human — it attempts to eliminate being, eliminate our ‘living’ nature, hence misrepresents our capabilities.

Surely we would seek the opposite: to maximise our capabilities, amplify the potential we have, understand and then leverage how we are designed…

The resulting journey for me has meant striving never to put humans in a situation where they are required to be machine-like. Then to design services, and products that support them, in ways that recognise the miracle that is life — where we are in flux from moment to moment.

This seemingly random spontaneity and engagement with the world is unique to being alive, all life inherently operates this way by definition.

It is easy to see where to incorporate AI in our services — in products that require perfection in their processes —in comparison we certainly have very little skill in this arena.

Also that where AI will never need to be cognisant of information outside of its artificial sense realm. In other words that operates in a petri dish like environment.

Humans on the other hand perform optimally in the opposite of a petri dish — when given full freedom, and when perfect repetition is suboptimal.

Stop and think for a second — when perfect repetition is suboptimal — if to you this sounds wayward, sounds like a nonsense, then you have yourself become disconnected with living, with life.

We never want to be greeted the same way every time by our friend, our loved one, even by our dog or cat. The delight of living arises when action is taken in the moment.

The very act of choosing of a Christmas present celebrates life. A service design that gave this task to an AI advisor would undermine the very point of Christmas.

Our services can be designed better for humans if we embrace our characteristics, our moment to moment experiences, our awareness and waywardness — this is where true service excels, where great products will one day be created.