I told me hilarious things about Elon Musk’s childhood work in a landscaping company – this is why it counts on the day of the Labor Day

At the risk of drawing rank, let me give a little background. In 1998, I built an “system of experts”, Profitent, which converted a complicated financial number into simple English. It is still used today. The expert system was an early predecessor of AI. The idea was simple: helping business owners understand their own financial statements in a way that would allow them to make better decisions. It worked well enough to make the banks started using it, which was both rewarding and alarming.

My fear was that people count too much on the system – that they would outsource their discernment to a machine. And they did it. Instead of using it as a tool to enlighten their decisions, some lenders used it as a replacement for decision -making. Like the credit dimensions today, which are, at best, significant heuristics but which are largely overused, technology has sometimes become a substitute for common sense. This is never the point. A number on a page, or words spanking by a program, cannot replace the crucial function that we hope that humans have: common sense and judgment.

Quick advance until today, and the world is obsessed with AI. The leaders of technology tell us that it will take control of almost all human role, lawyers and doctors to teachers and truck drivers. If you believe the titles, it is only a matter of time before computers do everything we do, only better. I think they survive their hand. Here is the reality: computers are excellent for chewing data, but they don’t think. They have no judgment. They don’t know how to say, “I don’t know.”

Recently, I tested different systems by asking: “What did Elon Musk learned by directing a landscaping company in adolescence?” I came back for a long time, confident and well -documented answers. There was a little problem. Elon Musk has never managed a landscaping company. The systems did not hesitate, did not report the question as defective, did not qualify its answer. They just invented something.

I learned that the height of human intelligence is the ability to say: “I don’t know” or “your question is incorrect”. In other words, think really. And, above all, if these systems do not understand what they do not know, it makes me ask me for their statements on what they know. Imagine a world where people are blindly counts on answers when the question is wrong or when the answer requires a context. Unfortunately, we are not far from that, I fear. And that’s the problem. These systems are not only mistaken, they are mistaken with authority.

Labor Day is to respect the human side of work. It is a question of remembering that the economy is not only a spreadsheet. A computer cannot paint a house, repair a pipe or manage a small business. He cannot start a business, manage a team or inspire a community.

This is why it is worth repelling the tremor of AI. Work has always been more than productivity. It is also a question of thinking critically and taking responsibility for your production, which can only come from us.

So, while we celebrate workers this labor celebration, remember: AI is not as intelligent as announced. It is not a threat. It is a reminder that human beings remain the most precious part of the economy. We cannot outsource thought. And we must not let ourselves believe that we can.

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