AI has been an increasingly dominant part of our discussions and working lives. Like it or not, we are pushed to use it.
I find it both exciting and worrying.
The obvious concern is loss of jobs but AI is unlikely to ever be a worthy replacement for my skillset. That isn’t to say that people at a senior leadership level who don’t understand testing & quality won’t think that, but AI shouldn’t replace us.
Instead it has a lot of potential to improve our jobs and working life. This excites me. In particular I think it could be useful as a buddy. Someone to give you extra ideas. A personal assistant that can take notes and summarise my meetings, freeing up the need to have a dedicated note taker in meetings (usually one of the team).
However as with all tools, it needs to be solving a problem. This makes me a touch concerned as there’s companies pushing hard for more AI without really understanding what it should be used for. Let’s not be underpants gnomes here.
I think my other worry is that it may be mistaken for being “correct” as opposed to giving you the most informed guess. This is where the wonderful quote about AI comes in… “monkeys with machine guns”. It isn’t easy to use effectively. I know that I need to get better at my prompting but being skilled with AI isn’t necessarily the ask. It is using AI.
Along these lines, we’re also expecting AI to give meaningful answers about topics that it doesn’t understand. The interesting test cases, complexities in code bases and analyzing data requires understanding the context. We need to be able to give AI context. You wouldn’t expect real intelligence to solve nuanced problems without understanding what it is talking about. So why should artificial intelligence fare any better?
So in summary, we’re expecting people to suddenly use it to solve our problems without caring enough about what those problems are, whether people have the skillset to use AI effectively and whether it has the context to come up with meaningful answers.
My advice would be when setting expectations on using AI, we should have done due diligence to know why we’re using it and to learn how we’re to use it. If we find tools that help us, share and teach how they can be of benefit.