Over the past year, I have been working on perfecting my banana bread recipe. I’ve nearly got it memorized, timed, and have taste tested enough of these experiments to grant my ass its own zip code.
The loaf I made this past weekend, however, showed signs of being my best yet. Golden brown on the outside with that chasm of lighter, gooey middle showing me I had about five more minutes remaining in the oven. As I placed it on my cooling rack (which may have just been a kitchen towel on my countertop), the entire insides burst out in a hot lava explosion. Nothing about the middle of this banana loaf was in any way done. It’s like the rules of convection completely failed me. I realized that I failed to put in enough flour causing the interior of the bread to simply not have enough “stuff” to bake.
Lesson learned.
Later that day, I headed out to a high school graduation. Unfortunately, the graduate won’t be getting a warm loaf of banana bread and will have to settle for a Chipotle gift card instead. But I had heard a buzz about a new way of announcing graduates this year. That they may be using an AI speaker. Fortunately, it was only a rumor. However, all this week, other schools that did choose to go that route got a teachable moment about how to screw up a recipe.
Listen, graduations are incredible snapshots in time. They make for one of the Top 10 photos of your life – something you’ll keep with you forever. But, like your wedding day or the birth of your first born, if something goes wrong, it also stays with you like a black mark on your life. And so, expectedly, a solution without a problem yielded terrible results. The AI skipped names, mispronounced names, and, frankly, was a poor substitute for a human being. Stop me if you’ve heard this before.
We have now reached the point where we are asking Artificial Intelligence to take over mundane tasks that AI has no business doing. Did we really need a computer reading out names? As a public address announcer, I can tell you that these gigs weren’t really paying much to begin with. Is shaving $150 off of the graduation budget really that necessary?
After paying $100,000 for college, you’d think you could swing $500 to hire a couple of announcers to help out.
And yet… there are more coming. Self-checkouts “now with AI!” that will still blink when you double scan your Monster energy drink. An AI customer service “chatbot” that will still serve you attitude while also giving the benefit of not answering your question. “REPRESENTATIVE.” These AI’s will be coming to entry level reception stations, healthcare, education, and you name it. Ironically, these college graduates will be fighting for entry-level jobs against the same machines that just mispronounced their names at graduation.
And maybe these are the jobs we eventually want them to take. Maybe in 10 years, these robots are deft enough to flip a perfect cheeseburger, and make correct change at QuikTrip, and take your insurance card when you check in to see your doctor. (Heck, in 10 years at this rate, your doctor might be AI, too.) But it’s clear these things aren’t close to being ready for prime time. We’re all being asked to beta test our replacements. So we should continue to react like these graduates did and stomp and scream and shout when R2-D2 can’t get a simple thing right.
In the meantime, I’m going to continue to mess up my banana bread recipe because I still have my own sense of agency, and no AI is going to screw up my recipe like me.
