AI Is a Teenager. We’re Handing It the Car Keys Too Early.
AI created image of course!
Someone asked me recently if AI is getting worse. The question came up during a conversation about some of the stranger things AI agents have done—making up lifetime warranties that do not exist or, in the case of the Wall Street Journal, running an AI-powered vending machine that confidently ordered a live fish, stocked a PlayStation, and gave everything away for free.¹
I love AI. I use it every day to do what it does best—make an individual more efficient. I have a workflow that goes through my email each month and pulls highlights for my executive update. It does a thousand-times better job than I ever did and regularly finds things I would have forgotten. It also occasionally misreads an email and produces a bullet I need to fix before sending. That tradeoff is more than acceptable. AI has exponentially increased what I can get done in a day. Turning an idea into reality—like designing a comprehensive sales metric that accounts for different prices, goals, and close rates across enterprise and B2C sales, something that used to take weeks, multiple textbooks, and daily questioning of my life choices—can now be done in a few hours next to a pool on vacation.
AI is not getting worse; our expectations have outkicked the coverage. We used to be amazed when AI could string together a couple of sentences. Now we expect it to read minds and fix all of our problems like magic. As a parent, I get it. As my kids grow and mature, I occasionally expect more of them than they are capable of (that time I sat down my five-year-old and built a physical model of the Sun, Earth, and Moon to scientifically explain an eclipse comes to mind). The blank look on their face quickly brings us back to reality.
The difference between how we are treating ai and our kids is how we respond to the increased capabilities. When my kids rolled over for the first time, we baby-proofed the entire house. The child gained a small ability and we put up guardrails. With AI, we are doing the opposite. It started to walk, so we unlocked all the doors and handed it the keys to the car with our other kids—some of whom are more capable drivers—in the back seat. The worst part is that we are surprised when it crashes into the tree across the street and flabbergasted that the rest of the kids don’t want to try it again.
AI is not getting worse. It is getting much better. It is far more capable this quarter than it was last quarter and will be more capable tomorrow than it is today. It is, however, still a teenager at best. It cannot run your business for you. It should not run your business for you. It just isn’t ready yet.