AI Asbestos
Asbestos—a nifty mineral that’s just popping out of the desert ground—boasts amazing properties like electrical and thermal insulation. It was an exciting discovery at the time: abundant, cheap, and useful in thousands of construction materials, so we put it everywhere. But then we learned inhaling it causes lung cancer. Oops.
Remediating asbestos is expensive and time-consuming. The crux of the issue is you must remove it carefully. Disturbing the material makes it airborne and dangerous.
Today, the hasty application of LLMs across society feels like the next asbestos moment. LLM tools promise many benefits to our work and our lives, but as we find their long term adverse effects we’ll someday regret embedding them and relying upon them.
Customer Support: Speed is not Success
No one enjoys calling customer service.
Long wait times are one of the core issues customers complain about. Nowadays, businesses are putting two and two together: maybe we can reduce wait times, and replace an employee with an LLM bot.
That sounds great at first, but there’s only one small problem: serving the customer faster doesn’t matter if the new method doesn’t actually solve their problem–or worse, if the new method frustrates them further.
Misunderstanding the customer is what makes an otherwise smart LLM seem stupid. When an AI-powered phone bot asks you “Can you please choose from this menu so I may direct your call?” and you reply “I just answered that in your previous question!”–then you have experienced first hand the central inaccuracy problem of fully automated customer service. The support agent must understand, otherwise what are you even doing on the phone? Ticking off your customers is a losing business strategy in the long term.
Klarna learned this the hard way. They swapped their human-based support for AI. The customers hated it. The business in turn had a difficult time collecting revenue from the people they just outraged–go figure.
The AI-based support totally backfired and eventually Klarna did a 180-degree flip, going back to front-line human support agents.
Using Chat GPT Makes You Dumber
A study shows higher AI tool usage is associated with reduced critical thinking skills. It makes perfect sense that “use it or lose it” applies to your brain the same way it does to your muscles.
Call me crazy, but maintaining intelligence as individuals and as a society seems to be important.
So what tradeoffs are we willing to make when it comes to thought-based work? Is summarizing an article with AI worth a downgrade in your reading comprehension skills? Is writing an email with AI worth sacrificing diplomacy skills and thoughtfulness? Is using AI for writing code worth accepting a decline in your problem-solving and troubleshooting abilities?
There are many ways a LLMs can supplement our lives, but the dangers of offloading too much work are becoming more apparent.
Conclusion
Installing the latest-and-greatest technology everywhere before we know its impact is a recipe for disaster. One way to avoid that that is to take Charlie Munger’s advice. Before wholeheartedly jumping into the trend, ask yourself the questions “How will this hurt me?” and “What do I give up by adopting this?”
Carefully removing AI from critical infrastructure–like the banking system just to name one–will inevitably cause collateral damage. It will be interesting to see how AI asbestos remediation emerges as a B2B service in the coming years.