Ethan Mollick is one of my favorite writers on the impact of AI on society. In a recent post, he describes what AI agents are capable of, if given free rein. It’s… a lot. He cautions that there are good reasons to limit the freedom we give to AI to make decisions for us. It’s this last one that resonates most for me:
If agents make every interesting decision and leave people with the approvals, the exceptions, and the failures, we will have automated the wrong half of the job. That would be a very bad world for humans. Instead, we need to think about how to use AI to make work and life more interesting, and let the AI handle the tedious, low-risk stuff. And there is a practical reason as well. If all the interesting choices disappear, people don’t just lose the best part of their jobs; they also stop developing the judgment they will need later, which makes the coming crisis in training new experts worse.
Read the whole thing (it’s kind of scary), here.