After Four Weeks at MIT, I'm Learning We're All Learning
Recently, my AI explorations have taken an academic turn.
I enrolled in an MIT Professional Education course: Applied Generative AI for Business Transformation. My first time in an academic setting since college. It takes some getting used to. It’s challenging. The homework is real. The other students are literal bosses.
We’re learning the theories behind neural networks. The inner workings of LLMs and RAG. The big questions around how businesses use AI and adapt to it.
Four weeks in, I’m forming some opinions.
Nobody knows anything.
Screenwriter William Goldman famously said it about Hollywood. It’s true here, too.
I’ve sat in lectures with renowned AI experts and business leaders. They’re honest: they don’t know where it’s headed. ChatGPT has been public for only two years. It’s early days.
A corollary: stay away from self-appointed “experts.” The professors willingly admit their vulnerability. Anyone who doesn’t is probably trying to sell you something. Learn AI in three days or 15 minutes a day? Please. I’ve been treating this like a job for four months and feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface.
Businesses want AI desperately. They have no idea how to implement it.
Take education, for example. Our professors know AI will transform it. But educational bureaucracies were designed for the old way of working. Transitioning from one-lecturer-to-many to 1:1 AI-driven tutoring won’t happen overnight. (If that’s where it goes.)
Now imagine big business bureaucracies.
Demand is FOMO-driven. Even if there were a road map (there isn’t), there are scant few experts in transforming organizations for AI to lead the caravan.
Humans aren’t replaceable. They bring what AI can’t.
AI hallucinates confidently. Without trained humans overseeing output, hallucinations go out the door. This creates extreme liability.
Humans also supply values, ethics, judgment, and insight. AIs are probability engines. Creativity is improbable. It’s the opposite of what they’re trained to deliver.
Right now, businesses think creatives are replaceable. They could not be more wrong. (Not that it’ll stop them.)
The people who’ll thrive as AI partners bring what AI doesn’t: creativity, humanity, empathy, curiosity, judgment.
This is a moment for generalists, not specialists. Humanists excel at being the human in the room. Generalists bring a deep and broad knowledge base, which makes them better partners to AI. (More on all that in a future post.)
So. Now what?
I’m taking my own advice, so I won’t make any confident predictions. But I do have some semi-confident ones:
Organizational change will happen slowly. There’s no roadmap. Businesses that cut their humans too aggressively will pay a price. The pendulum will swing back towards a more balanced view of the human-AI partnership. But not tomorrow.
The best way to prepare for the future? Learn all we can about our new alien partners.
This is me, semi-confidently signing off.
