Frustration with AI may be a management problem

How much of the frustration with AI comes from people who have never managed anyone? 🤔

For about ten years I worked exclusively as an engineer, and I genuinely thought that team managers were losers, and I could not see what they were needed for. 🙃 I thought that way because I was used to managing a computer, where everything is simple: you press the button and it does the thing.

Then my colleagues and I opened our own company, my manager shift started, and things turned out far more complicated, because a human being is not a computer. A machine is like a car with a steering wheel, two pedals and a gear selector, while every person is a separate spaceship running its own control system, and there is no pedal on a human that you press. You have to say something, sprinkle a bit of sugar somewhere, look into what motivation is, read up on their psychology, and only after that you can get people to give the result you need. 😅 Maybe.

I keep coming back to that shift now, because at a certain level of abstraction AI behaves like a human being, the only difference being that managing AI is a child's play compared to managing people.

I catch myself sitting there thinking: damn, AI, you are so dumb, I do not even know how to explain this to you.

And then it lands on me that literally three days earlier I had exactly the same thought about a person: I have explained this to you five times already, come on, how else do I approach you so you understand and do these tasks?

Which makes me look differently at the disappointment in AI that shows up in my feed. Maybe part of it is a management problem rather than a model problem. It seems to come from people who have not managed anyone, who have not been through the hardening, and whose expectations of a model look a lot like the expectations a first-time manager has of their reports.

So the question I would put to anyone furious at a model this week is what they did the last time a person failed to understand them five times in a row. 🙃