The Big Information Problem AI Doesn’t Solve

It is just sad that everyone thinks that they need to write something insightful about AI.

AI this, AI that. There is a lot of noise. But I am not sure how much signal there really is. Generating, managing, distributing, using and communicating about information is really challenging. Most organizations struggle with effective information management. There are thousands of tools and applications on the market. Some of them aim to do very targeted things while others are ambitiously geared to tackle enterprise wide functions.

As I have written in other columns, information management tools do a great job of reducing the complexity of information into fields in a database. In reality, information exists in superposition until it is documented and put into an information system somewhere. This is a necessary reduction in order to have any kind of chance of managing information, but the information is still evolving and interacting with factors outside of your control. 

Now enter AI.  AI is the miracle tool that is somehow going to make sense of all the fragments of information that were reasonably accurate at a moment in time. The rule of garbage in and garbage out still applies, but just in a more probabilistic way. 

Give AI a good prompt and some specific instructions and AI will write a lot of plausible sounding content. It will even write a computer program for you. This can save time and make work easier for individuals, but at this time it really can’t do anything but add to the fact that information exists in superposition.

While there are instances where the sheer quantity of information has the effect of impressing or intimidating the recipient of the information, it doesn’t change the fundamental nature of information.

We are still trying to manage information as if it is a discrete almost physical item that can be managed in some defined linear process. This works sometimes especially in certain cases with special information, and because it works sometimes we continue to think that all we need to do to fix this infinitely complex problem is to tweak some fields in a database.

AI doesn’t simplify information management or necessarily increase productivity for organizations, if anything AI compounds the challenges of communication and information management.

Information is organic and exists in its own way between states, and artificial intelligence does very little if anything to change that. The real breakthrough management technique will emerge from organizations that learn how to work with information as it exists, not as we wish it to be.