They understood the technology, but not the job.
Michael Lewis warned that baseball scouts were heading for extinction. 15 years later, MLB teams had hired 32% more of them.
Geoffrey Hinton said we should stop training radiologists.
The Mayo Clinic now has 55% more of them.
Those touting the technology are quick to make predictions about people. But the technology doesn’t decide what happens. How people use it does. To predict that, you need to understand two things.
First, the job. The inputs and outputs, the edge cases, the workflows, the incentives.
Second, and often overlooked, the cognitive predispositions of the people doing it.
When I was building AI for radiologists, the industry was focused on one kind of error: missing something on the image. But radiologists make at least a dozen others. They anchor on the clinical history. They stop looking after the first finding. Put an AI flag on the screen and they may trust it too much, or after enough false alarms, not enough.
Baseball learned the same lesson. Teams had more data than ever, but a hitter can only hold a thought or two in the batter’s box. The edge went to the coaches who knew which one to give him.
The technology didn’t replace those people. It ran into how they think.
Now predictions abound about the rest of us. AI will replace knowledge workers, we’re told, starting with entry-level jobs.
I don’t think the Big AI labs understand the job.
Their predictions are making the same mistake: they’re looking at what the technology can do, not at how people will work with it.