Artificial intelligence has no capacity for judgment
When being fast becomes the bare minimum, the scarcest asset in organizations becomes judgment. And AI does not judge: it emulates.
In the first Life After AI conversation, while discussing the MIT study on the augmentation trap, we ended up talking at length about what we can delegate to AI and what we should never delegate.
Today any team with the same tools can produce more in less time, and when everyone can be fast, being fast stops being an advantage and becomes the bare minimum. What was rare has become standard, and what becomes standard no longer differentiates. So what will remain rare in organizations? Our bet is that the scarcest asset from here on will be judgment.
When we ask an AI for a recommendation, it answers with such confidence that it gives the impression of having weighed the options before responding. But it did not judge, because judging involves ethical and moral questions that do not fit in an algorithm; it involves projecting the future from the experience and intuition of the person deciding, and the model was built entirely on data from the past.
Judging is also carrying the weight of the choice, because whoever decides between A and B bears the consequences of that decision, and the tool bears no consequence at all. What it does is emulate a judgment and look quite convincing.
And if the machine does not judge, why are we so willing to leave judgment to it? Because judging is tiring, deciding has an emotional cost, choosing A knowing that B was left behind weighs on us, and a tool that offers a ready answer to any doubt is offering, deep down, relief from that weight.
Day to day nobody notices the loss; deliveries keep going out, even faster than before. But when a situation outside the pattern appears, the kind where you have to decide without support, the capacity to decide is no longer there, neither in the person nor in the organization that let its people stop practicing.
A curious detail came up in our conversation: while companies rush to automate customer service and customer contact, research is beginning to show consumers rejecting anything that looks like it was written by a chatbot, a genuine allergy. It makes sense, because if a quick, ready answer has become everyone's standard, value migrates to what automation does not deliver: someone on the other side capable of understanding the context and deciding together with you.
Delegating tasks to AI can make sense, and we do it every day, but delegating judgment is giving up what we have that is most valuable and hardest to recover. Keeping people deciding at the important points of a process, even when the tool could carry on alone, will need to be a conscious decision by organizations, because inertia and the pressure for speed push in the opposite direction.
How is it going in your organization? Where did you keep people deciding, and where did you let the tool carry on alone?
The full episode that gave rise to this text is on the Life After AI YouTube and Spotify. The episode is in Portuguese.