By David Lawson, CEO, Call Simulator
While going through some old books the other day, I came across the IBM Watson cookbook given away at the Watson headquarters opening in 2014. I was there because I had proposed using Watson to glean insights from nonprofit organization impact reports and argued that had this been possible in the early 2000s we could have seen the opioid crisis unfolding much sooner than we did. It was an AI for Good idea, and IBM has a philanthropic history, so I found myself and my company at what I now realize was the beginning of commercial AI at scale.
Fast forward to today and Watson is a distant memory, subsumed by generative AI, which our company uses around the clock to provide automated role-play at scale. The cookbook brought back more than nostalgic memories. It also made me think of a Twilight Zone episode, “To Serve Man.”
[Spoiler alert]
Aliens come to Earth and promise peace and amazing technology to solve all of our problems. They leave a book that one of the characters translates as “To Serve Man.” That sounds like exactly the kind of advanced civilization we would want to visit us, set not on our destruction, but on serving our every need.
Too late we realize this is not a manual to bring peace and prosperity. It is a cookbook, and we humans are the main ingredient.
AI, not unlike those aliens, was initially seen as an amazing discovery ready to transform how we work and help us find answers to seemingly unsolvable questions. How do we save the planet from ourselves? How do we cure diseases we thought incurable?
Now AI has made its intentions known, not to eat us for dinner, but to take away our ability to buy it. Companies proudly proclaimed that humans would no longer be necessary, as AI and the robots it powers would take both jobs requiring our brains and jobs requiring our muscles.
Rod Serling, like so many science fiction writers, was warning us back in 1962 to not fall so quickly in love with promises of peace and prosperity. Take a moment to understand what is truly on the table, and make sure it is not you.
The Valuation Question Nobody Wants to Answer
As I write this, AI stock volatility is front-page news, with investors publicly questioning whether sky-high valuations can be justified without tangible returns from the massive capital expenditure plans companies have touted. The NBC News headline this week captures it plainly. And the Satya Nadella interview in the Wall Street Journal, published June 22, crystallizes the structural problem: if all the value from AI accrues to a handful of companies, the political economy simply will not tolerate it.
That is worth sitting with. The CEO of one of the largest tech companies in the world is essentially arguing that the current trajectory is unsustainable, not because the technology does not work, but because the economic model built around it does not distribute value broadly enough to survive.
The headline: We Can’t Let AI Giants Eat the Economy is the character at the end of the Twilight Zone episode screaming to her colleague, “It’s a cookbook!”
I have been following the money and the motivation in AI for years. The insane valuations require us to be blind to technological limitations and costs. The motivation is power, and whether you are a government or a business, that power has different meanings. In either case, regular humans are left to wonder and worry.
What AI Actually Is
A note on the Watson cookbook, because it is worth remembering: it had some truly novel recipes and ingredients, which when you dug deeper came about because Watson did not care about cost. If a rare chocolate was needed, just buy it. Token costs are doing the same thing to enterprises today.
This is not because AI is malicious. AI does not have evil or good intentions. It has goals, data, and objectives, which may at times produce good outcomes and at times produce harmful ones. That distinction matters. We are not fighting a villain. We are managing a very powerful tool that has no stake in the outcome.
Then Why Are You Using It?
You are right to push back (a favorite AI phrase). My answer is that I believe AI can genuinely serve us, in the best sense of that word.
At Call Simulator, AI enables our clients to safely practice conversations with AI, rather than with humans. That means a learner can run role-play after role-play until they feel genuinely confident in a real-world, high-stakes conversation, and customers never have to endure someone’s learning curve.
For instructional designers, we put AI into their tool box so they can put their experience and creativity to work in minutes, not days.
The Question Every Leader Has to Answer
When I speak about AI and I am not an all-in believer, people tell me, “But you don’t know what’s right around the corner.” I follow the money and the motivation. The money is in valuations that require blind optimism. The motivation is power. That combination has never ended well for the people standing in the middle.
In every age of technological transformation, the value of uniquely human capabilities has risen, not fallen. AI is no exception. The organizations that understand this will invest differently in their people. The ones that do not will discover the gap when it is too late to close it.
The question is not whether AI will serve you or replace you. The question is whether you are making that choice deliberately, or letting someone else make it for you.
If you are interested in letting your people practice on AI rather than on your customers, get in touch.
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