AI Freedom

A co-worker was sharing his AI experience, he’s a young software engineer, and he admitted to being wrong about a previous decision. A few days ago he said he’d never pay for AI, that he could do the coding himself and it wouldn’t be worth it.

And I get that – AI often suggests writing something for me, or proof reading for errors, and as a someone who enjoys writing this is sort of insulting. I can do it myself, I reasoned – why would I need a machine to insert itself in something that I’m somewhat proud to produce?

Anyway, today the young engineer let me know that he reversed his decision about paying for AI because he tried it on a home project and the results blew him away. He not only decided to pay for it, but bought a premium subscription because of how valuable it proved to be.

Now I’m no software engineer, and I know next to nothing about AI short of my simple little requests. (The engineer pulled up an example of what AI produced for him and it was impressive – functions to review code, suggest improvements, analyze subcomponents, maintain a specified style – it was very impressive even though I know nothing about code.) My AI experience has been asking it to show me how to work my camera, or walk me thru a new software package. It didn’t produce anything so much as it explained things.

And that’s what I’m sort of jealous about with AI and where I’m at in my career. I’m close to retiring, so AI adoption is more of a curious hobby rather than crucial to my career. And one of the things I’ve found it to be excellent at is explaining things at work.

Gotta take a side journey here – the culture at work has a backdrop of fear to it. Not fear of losing your job so much as fear of being exposed for not understanding something. This is most evident in meetings, where someone is presenting something and a lot of people don’t understand, but are afraid to admit it. Often at the end of these things, the presenter will ask if there are any questions – and nobody says anything. My guess is half the people who don’t ask a question are hiding the fact that they don’t understand something but are afraid to ask about it. It took me years to recognize this as a trap, that asking questions is actually a good thing, that admitting you don’t know something not only frees you up, but it sort of releases others to be able to admit the same. “I don’t understand, can you explain it please?” is really a good thing – but we’re so afraid to admit this weakness.

Here’s where AI comes in – you can ask it about all that stuff you don’t understand and it will explain things. The AI at work has access to meeting notes, email, chat… ask it about a company product or a procedure, and it breaks things down so you have a better understanding, so you won’t look like a total fool in one of those meetings. Now I’m nA200475/ot saying it’s always going to be right, there’s always the potential for wrong output – but it can at least give a framework to understand and maybe lead to being able to ask an intelligent question.

This is huge. It gives a head start toward knowing more about what is important to the company instead of guessing or hiding behind ignorance. I’m jealous – so many times in the past it would have been good to have this intelligent friend to patiently explain and answer all my stupid questions.