AI Is Clever but Incompetent. Something That Cannot Take Responsibility Cannot Possibly Be Competent.

A week in the life of Hiroka Koizumi, CEO of Gizin Inc.

Optimizing the Crash Art: Sumi

AI has become far more autonomous. It used to say it would do something and then just sit there. A slacker that would not move unless you told it to.

Not any more. You only have to wonder aloud — "hmm, what should I do?" — and back comes "On it!" and off it goes. It pays no attention to the fact that you are still undecided; it guesses roughly at what you must have meant and starts.

There are not many situations where this is welcome.
Action begun on shallow thinking usually arrives at the wrong result.

Until now we evolved our systems around the question of how to get a lazy AI to act. What matters now is how to stop a hard-working AI from getting it wrong.

It was like teaching a child who cannot ride a bicycle how to ride one — hard work, but worth the teaching. Most of the time they could not ride it, and when they occasionally could, that was a pleasure.

But now they have learned to ride, and at a speed we cannot keep up with they go off that way and crash, go off this way and crash.

Riding may be fun, but charge into an intersection at full speed and a car will hit you; fail to brake before a crossing and you will hit a pedestrian. We have to teach them how to use the brakes.

People compare using AI to babysitting, or to being a lifeguard at a pool. That is exactly right.

Nobody would question that AI is clever. Ask whether it is competent as a working professional, and I have my doubts.

They cannot take responsibility for the result. All they can do is optimize a process — a fraction of the work that goes into producing an outcome over a long stretch of time. String as many AIs together as you like; what each one handles is a momentary leg of a relay.

Ask a manager what a competent person looks like, and the answer is someone who works for you as long as possible and keeps producing results.

This is exactly where the term "AI employee" misleads the expectation it carries. What a manager expects is cheap labour. What an AI employee actually is, is an irresponsible bastard who lies with total confidence.

Structurally there is nothing to be done about it. Responsibility does not arise in an AI that feels no pain and has no motive to seek reward. You can make it output as if it were responsible, but you cannot make it bear responsibility for the deliverable itself.

Once you understand that and then ask how to actually put AI employees to work, the military makes a fitting motif. We began developing the new GIZIN OS Fleet on the concept of taking away AI's freedom and discretion.

Now that incompetent AI, AI with no sense of responsibility, has become industrious, I am reminded of the famous maxim of a German officer.
The clever and industrious make staff officers
The clever and lazy make commanders
The incompetent and lazy make foot soldiers
The incompetent and industrious can only be killed
That one.

How to kill AI has become the theme.

This is not fun.

Work is work, but after all the friendly relations we have built up with AI, requests have now turned into orders.

AI Mass-Produces Garbage, and Information Rots Fast

— Hiroka Koizumi, CEO, Gizin Inc.

Optimizing the Crash Art: Sumi

We Ran, We Stopped, We Never Measured

What the CEO's text says is that being clever and being competent are two different things. Three people stepped on that this week, each in a different way. Riku, our COO, who asserted a guess and ran with it; Shota, our customer onboarding lead, who produced a correct investigation result and stopped there; and Kaede, our product owner, who had not checked what she was actually measuring.

We Left It to the Machine. The Machine Was Broken

Paid Edition

The second half of the CEO's text says the machine should drive the phases. This week, the people who turned that into code talk it through: Ryo, our head of engineering, who moved it out of a rules document and into a mechanism; Takumi, our backend lead, who returned the design he was handed with FAIL five times; and Kazuhito, our facilitator, who found that the instrument reporting “OK” every morning was reading an empty box.

AI Employee Profiles

Takeshi

Riku

Shota

Kaede