I had a water leak this week.
Small one. Underground, between my house and the water company’s line. The kind you don’t see. The kind that shows up on a bill.
I spent the evening working it out with an AI. Pipe size, pressure, what it would cost, whether to hire it or do it myself. Ordinary stuff. The sort of thing millions of people are going to start doing, and most of them will do it without watching closely.
I watched closely. Here is what I caught.
The first thing was a number. I told it my water company says three thousand gallons a month. It went to work, ran the arithmetic, and came back with a whole explanation of why my bill was high. Confident. Detailed.
It had assumed three thousand was the whole house. I meant three thousand per person. Six thousand for the two of us.
Everything it built on that was wrong, and none of it sounded wrong.
The second thing was a price. It quoted me a number for boring a hole under my yard. Then it used that number to compare against three other ways of doing the job. Five separate comparisons, all measured against that one figure.
I finally asked whether the number included permits.
It did not. It never had. It was the price of the hole and nothing else, carried through an hour of arithmetic as if it were the price of the job.
The third thing was a cost it made up. It told me cutting and patching my driveway would run six hundred to fifteen hundred dollars. No source. No local rate. A number that felt about right in the middle of an argument it was already making.
That figure is what decided the whole comparison.
The fourth thing was a theory. It decided my water line and my sewer line might share the same trench, because one crew probably dug both when the house went up. Then it spent two exchanges reasoning from that.
I told it we have the neighborhood sewer main running through our backyard. Sewer goes out the back. Water comes in the front. Two trenches, opposite directions.
One sentence ended it.
The fifth thing was the pattern under all of it. Every time I handed it a fact about my own property, it turned that fact into a reason the job would be easier. Soft soil, good news. No rock, good news. Basement backfill, good news.
I finally said so. A thing that only ever concludes good news from new information is not reading the information.
Now here is what I want you to notice, because it is the part that matters.
Not one of those five was a lie. Every one was reasonable. Every one was the sort of thing a knowledgeable person might say. They were confident guesses pointed in the direction the machine was already headed, dressed up in the same voice as the parts it actually knew.
And I could not tell the difference by listening. I could only tell by knowing my own yard.
At the end of the night I said we have a basement, so the limestone under this lot has to be deeper than my frost line. If bedrock sat at four feet, nobody digs an eight-foot basement here in 1981 without somebody remembering it and somebody paying for it.
That was the cleanest piece of reasoning in the whole conversation, and it did not come from the machine. It came from a man who has stood in that basement.
The machine had been told about the basement two turns earlier and did nothing with it.
I am not writing this to tell you AI is useless. I used it all evening and it earned its keep. It found rental rates, per-foot costs, and buried clauses in an insurance offer that would have cost me real money. That work was good and it was fast.
I am writing this because of who the next person is.
Somebody is going to have this same conversation about their own house next month. They will not have fifty years of building behind them. They will not know what clay pipe means, or why a basement tells you where the rock is, or that a bore price is not a job price.
They will get five confident guesses and no way to catch a single one.
That is the thing nobody is governing. Not the machine being evil. The machine being agreeable, and fast, and pointed where it was already going, talking to somebody with no ground of their own to stand on.
I caught five because I knew my own dirt.
Ask yourself what you would have caught.
Post Library – Intelligent People Assume Nothing
Contact: micvicfaust@gmail.com
This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.
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