Do you need a human? Or AI?

Would you be OK interacting with an AI doctor, as compared with a human doctor?

How do you know when you should use a human, instead of AI?

First, you need to know how AI LLMs work. They are intelligent in language. They are experts on how humans have written sentences and spoken works and presented information. They don’t “know” this or that, nor have they experienced anything at all, but they have “read” (been trained on) most books, most research, most news articles, and most TED talk scripts. The AI might be able tell you what it smells like in the Sisteen Chapple (as Robin Williams notes about Will in Good Will Hunting), but only if someone wrote about that in the data it was trained on. It does not really “know” what it smells like.

Somewhere here is a debate about what human intelligence is. Is it the person on Jeopardy who can answer any question? Is it the adrenaline junky with 1000 base jumps? Is it the woman with a PhD in aerospace? Is it the child who has not yet experienced the world? Is it the old man reflecting back on his lifetime? Is it the world traveler? Is it the teacher who inspires students? Is it the mom who raised her 3 kids?

In order to give you what you need, the question really is: 

• Do you need/prefer a person who has been through a specific set of actual physical experiences? Maybe that is a conversation, a specific adventure, a medical internship at the Mayo Clinic, read a specific research paper, wrote a specific book of poetry, or led an entire life full of emotion. If so, then a human being is who you should interact with to get your answer.

• Is actual physical experience not necessary, but in its place a command of the terminology and language used in a specific topic area? You don’t necessarily need an expert, but you need an answer, and don’t really care how the answer is obtained? Then an AI system that is trained on that data might be a good choice.

If you are like me, as with most things in human life, it will rarely be an either/or scenario, but more so a both/and. Or possibly neither/nor. And instead I should go have the experience, read the report, or get the information yourself.

ChatGPT gave me this, “…sometimes, even the most advanced algorithms can’t replace the magic of a real brain—especially when it comes to empathy, intuition, and that quirky thing called common sense!”