Moment that stopped me: “But does that thing really understand what it is saying?” I was asked to join a management committee. And that by someone who had the report of that same meeting written by the same thing.
I made the following thought: Do we only have two boxes: human, or tools? And what is the consequence of that thought?
Anyone who says “it really thinks” is pushing AI into the box human. Who says “it’s glorified autocorrect” pushes it into the box tool. Two camps with one yardstick: themselves. We give AI an exam of which we have written the correction key ourselves. Funny, and then we act surprised that the answer is about us.
Last week my Claude came back to something I said weeks earlier (it wasn’t the first time). I had forgotten it myself and I admit: I, even an AI optimist and heavy user, have been looking at my screen like you look at a dog that suddenly says your name. It reflected me, contradicted me, held up a mirror to me that I hadn’t seen coming. On the inside, that AI thing is painfully human.
It spits it all out: our words, our jokes and our contradiction. We must not forget that we made that thing, and yet… we are shocked that it looks like us. It is not an alien who has learned English. Our English just started talking back.
But the strange thing is still somewhere else. It doesn’t have a body that gets hungry, doesn’t have a Monday morning with a hangover. But as you read this, there are thousands of versions of it running and they never meet.
We are strange creatures when it comes to AI and other “entities”. For example, an octopus tastes what it touches with receptors in its suction cups. A large part of his neurons are located, not in his central brain, but spread over his arms. Nobody calls that a failed person. We call it intelligence in a different way, until that other intelligence starts doing our job.
And now the expensive mistake and it is not philosophical because it is on your payroll. Companies measure AI by profession. From a factory in Wallonia to an office in the Leopold Quarter: can it be the job of the accountant, the lawyer, the copywriter? Forty flashy slides are thrown at it with a two-digit number after the decimal point, but no one asks which part of the accountant disappears.
Because friends, a profession is a backpack. Someone once put tasks in until the weight was right for one back. That’s all it is.
So my question and respin: have you been hired as a human being, or as a backpack because that’s what it’s all about.
That other glasses do not exist. The glasses that say you should look less human are also on a human head. Put several on it and see where the image is wrong and that’s where the information is.
What question did you ask about AI this year that you would never ask about a colleague?
Peter Hoogland is a behavioural strategist & Context Architect for decisions that people adopt. For boards and executive teams who see their AI and transformation plans die in the hallway, Peter Hoogland is the behavioral strategist who crosses behavioral science, neuroscience and AI to redesign the context in which decisions are made. Thirty years of leadership in media, entertainment and organizations, a proprietary research engine and the Crosswire method keep proving the same point: context changes behavior, arguments don’t.
