Having an AI Coworker Can Be Convenient, Efficient -- and Lonesome

This month's AI news leaves me unworried about AI replacing me -- but a little worried about AI replacing people in my work life.

A real ad for a food delivery app, circa 2016. That was before "burrito bots," which means the "zero human contact" promise is fulfilled only by not counting the delivery person. Which is, by the way, one reason I'm skeptical of the idea that people could be tricked into treating robots as humans. People don't even treat humans as human all the time.

After a couple of years of generative AI swirling around workplaces and schools, a rough consensus is starting to form: 2024’s genAI won’t work as your replacement, but it will do fine as your assistant. It can’t write as well as real writers, or do the same kind of research as a trained historian, or versify as well as good poet, or run an experiment like a seasoned scientist. Yet it can help all those people.

Teachers

In high schools and colleges, for example, teachers are discovering that genAI can indeed help students learn, if they have the discipline to set it up as a kind of teacher, rather than just having it do their work. To para…