This week I was asked to debate whether AI should be used in financial counselling.
I was on the ‘yes’ side.
Sitting in front of me were 1,000 financial counsellors, arms folded, all thinking the same thing:
This bloke’s trying to replace me with a robot.
And who can blame them?
Still, this horror movie has been playing for a hundred years, and it always ends the same way:
The job apocalypse has been “five years away” … for the past one hundred years.
Case in point:
In 2016, the so-called godfather of AI, Nobel prize winner Geoffrey Hinton, declared we should stop training radiologists immediately. He said it was ‘clearly obvious’ that AI would replace them within five years.
Today?
There is a shortage of radiologists. Last year there were 4,000 unfilled roles in the US alone.
Why?
Well, AI became their assistant … not their replacement.
Which brings us to today’s hype cycle:
The founder of ChatGPT is warning that AI will be so devastating we’ll all need a government handout to survive. I’m highly sceptical … at least in the next five years. I don’t know about you, but my interactions with the chatbots remind me of this meme:
Wife: “Did you do the dishes?”
Me: “Yes.”
Wife: “Why are they still dirty?”
Me: “You’re right to push back on that. I didn’t actually do them.”
Wife: “I hate you.”
Me: “You’re absolutely right. This one’s on me. Ready to clean?”
The fact is that these language models are three years old: they’re still techno toddlers.
Will AI get better?
No doubt. Hundreds of billions of dollars that are currently being invested in AI says it will.
Yet here’s what the AI hype merchants miss entirely:
For all the technological advancements, we are lonelier than we have ever been. Anxiety diagnoses have doubled in a decade. Two thirds of us don’t trust what we read online, as AI fakes flood our feeds.
We spend our nights sitting alone, heads down, scrolling on our dopamine casinos.
We are starving for human connection.
Which is why a financial counsellor, a real one, sitting across from you, listening without judgement, helping you make sense of your money when your life is falling apart …
Cannot be automated.
AI will crunch the numbers, but it won’t hold your hand when everything goes sideways.
And the more artificial the world gets, the more valuable people who actually give a damn become.
Tread Your Own Path!