Automated Shortcuts

You can't automate empathy

New York Crystal Palace: For the Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations by Frances Flora Bond Palmer, 1853 (Yale University Art Gallery - public domain)

“One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.”

— Elbert Hubbard, 1911

Humans will always look for shortcuts to get what we desire.

The elevator pitch, the résumé, the cost overrun, the building of the transcontinental railroad, cryptocurrency, the balloon mortgage, the subprime loan, day trading, the missile gap, the housing bubble, stonk memes, the Laffer curve, tax cuts, the Twitter blue check — all of these amount to champagne wishes and caviar dreams that can be yours too as part of a get-rich-quick scheme that promises you the moon for the low, low price of your integrity.

And so the promise of AI  — more specifically LLMs like Chat…