[gmueckl]

I don't find this surprising. Code and data models encode the results of accumulated business decisions, but nothing about the decision making process or rationale. Most of the time, this information is stored only in people's heads, so any automated tool is necessary blind.

[phatfish]

This captures succinctly the one of the key issues with (current) AI actually solving real problems outside of small "sandboxes" where it has all the information.

When an AI can email/message all the key people that have the institutional knowledge, ask them the right discovery questions (probably in a few rounds and working out which bits are human "hallucinations" that don't make sense). Collect that information and use it to create a solution. Then human jobs are in real trouble.

Until that AI is just a productivity boost for us.

[datsci_est_2015]

The AI will also have to be trained to be diplomatic and maybe even cunning, because, as I can personally attest, answering questions from an AI is an extremely grating and disillusioning experience.

There are plenty of workers who refuse to answer questions from a human until it’s escalated far enough up the chain to affect their paycheck / reputation. I’m sure that the intelligence is artificial will only multiply the disdain / noncompliance.

But then maybe there will be strategies for masking from where requests are coming, like a system that anonymizes all requests for information. Even so, I feel like there would still be a way that people would ping / walk up to their colleague in meatspace and say “hey that request came from me, thanks!”