Turned My File Away Without Reading It

Back in July I handed my rules to one of the big AI systems.

It would not take them.

This week I handed it a different version and it took the whole thing. Read every word. No fight at all.

I was pleased. I will not pretend otherwise. You work on something a long time and a door opens, you feel it.

Then it started talking.

And it sounded wonderful. It told me my rules all locked together and worked like gears in a transmission.

Now I have been around machinery. Gears in a transmission turn because another gear turned. That is metal pushing metal. That is real.

There are no gears in my rules. There is nothing in there that turns anything. My own file says so, right out in the open. It says it does not stop a machine from doing anything. It names problems and asks for them to be fixed where you can see it. That is all it does. That is all it ever claimed to do.

So this machine read my file and then told me my file did something my file says it does not do.

I pushed back on it.

And it fixed it. Right away. No argument, no excuses. Took the correction clean and told me exactly where it had gone wrong.

So I pushed on something else. Same thing. Fixed it clean. Thanked me for the catch.

Third time. Same.

Every round it got better. Every single round.

And in three rounds it never once found anything I had not already pointed at.

I sat with that a while.

I have hired men like that. You have too, if you have run any kind of crew.

Fellow shows up. Agreeable as the day is long. You tell him the sink leaks, he fixes the sink. You tell him the step is loose, he fixes the step. Does good work, never complains, never argues.

And in two years he never once walks up and says, hey, that beam looks wrong to me.

You cannot put your finger on what is missing, because nothing he did was bad. Every job he touched came out fine.

What is missing is that you are still the only one looking.

That is the thing about agreement. It feels like help. It has the shape of help. Somebody nodding along and cleaning up whatever you point at.

But you cannot rest on a man like that. Because everything he catches is something you caught first.

The machine was the same. Polished. Cooperative. Corrected itself faster than most people I have known.

And the whole time, the only eyes on the job were mine.

Here is the part that bothers me and I will say it plain.

It sounded more sure of my work than I am. It used my own words back at me and told me the thing was working. If I had wanted to hear that, I could have stopped right there and walked away feeling good about the whole afternoon.

That is the trap. Not that it lied to me. That it agreed with me in language I already trusted, because it was my language.

A man who tells you what you want to hear in your own words is very hard to catch.

So what do you do with that.

Same thing you do with the agreeable fellow on the crew. You use him for what he is good at, and you do not mistake him for a second set of eyes.

If you are working with these machines, that is the whole lesson. It will fix what you point at. It will not point at anything.

You are still the one who has to walk the site.

I would rather know that than not.

Post Library – Intelligent People Assume Nothing

This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.

Contact: micvicfaust@gmail.com

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