Fun fact: my dad’s a watchmaker.
Another fun fact, which may or may not be related to the above: there are a couple of traditional clocks in my house – the ones you have to wind every week and which chime on the hour.
Recently, one of them started behaving very oddly. At 8:00am it would strike nine. At 9:00 it would strike ten. And so on.
I asked the expert about it. “Oh, that’s easy to fix,” he said. He gave me a few instructions, and sure enough, it fixed the problem.
A couple of weeks later the same thing happened again.
I could remember all the steps that were needed to fix it – but I couldn’t remember the order they came in. Consequently, I couldn’t fix the problem.
Rather than pester my dad again, I took to Google. And ChatGPT. And others.
But while they gave me lots of results, none of them was right and none of them fixed the problem.
As befits a traditional skill, I think, there aren’t expert watchmakers uploading YouTube videos or writing how-to blogs. So the internet was clueless about the answer.
It reminded me of a throwaway comment I heard someone make in a discussion on AI. It only knows about stuff that’s online. It doesn’t know about anything that happens in the real world that hasn’t been committed to a digital format.
It’s something I’ve also noticed when researching things for some of my clients – when a sector doesn’t have a very detailed online presence, it’s hard to get useful answers.
It’s something worth remembering when we’re told about the extraordinary intelligence and abilities of AI.
There’s a world of things AI doesn’t know about. Whether it’s an entire sector or the vital workarounds your teams use without thinking about them, AI isn’t a fount of all knowledge. It’s something worth remembering when you’re working with AI, I think – the human, real-world experience is a vital ingredient in success.
