Artificial Intelligence.  We’ve all been experiencing for a while, but just haven’t noticed it.

If you’ve enjoyed autocorrect or autocomplete when working online or on your mobile devices, then you’ve enjoyed Artificial Intelligence at work.

And we all know how well autocorrect works, right?

Now that the Internet is SO incredibly huge, technology has the capacity to aggregate information and distill it into a summary, even giving it a particular style, through the magic of ChatGPT (which, by the way, stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer).

We train the technology by giving specific parameters around the information we’re looking for, the technology generates it, then transforms it into a format which we can utilize and/or understand.

And since everything on the Internet is truthful and trustworthy, we know it will always be correct, right?

I think you can see where I’m going with this.

What we don’t realize is that while we train the technology, the technology is also training us.

The ubiquity of technology has trained us to expect instant answers to difficult questions, simple solutions for complex and systemic issues, and “hotfixes” rather than investigative research and development to create efficiencies.

And since it takes no time at all for technology to provide those answers, the additional expectation is that it will be available at no cost.  After all, if time is money, then “no time” translates to “no money.”

But we do pay for it in more surreptitious ways – like the monthly cost of Internet connectivity, the monthly cost of a dataplan, the monthly cost of a mobile phone and tablet, and the energy it takes to power those devices and keep them charged.

Humans, on the other hand, require time in order to process complex requests, especially in this “exceptional” era.  It’s not that the time in which we live is an “exceptional” one – it’s that everyone believes that an exception needs to be made for them because of their particular situation.

We see this played out time and time again, from the angry customer, to the customer service representative that’s given an ultimatum.  Then we may rejoice or laugh when we see the customer get put in their place when security is summoned, or when customers are stupefied by a witty retort to an irate rant.

Humans need time to develop and implement cogent and coherent solutions that are cohesive in both the cognitive domain and the affective domain.  There is an important emotional component that enters into a remediation.  People relate to one another not because they are an intellectual species, but because humans are drawn toward one another due to an emotional connection between or among them.  The concept of caring allows one to choose or develop a solution that demonstrates an attitude of concern for everyone involved.

Technology, on the other hand, is devoid of affection.

You may have heard the phrase, “Honey badger don’t care.”  Neither does technology.