AI may make our work look smarter, but what happens when you’re asked to actually explain it?
Economist John A. List, writing in Wednesday’s X, said he was initially concerned that AI would devalue critical thinkers and, by extension, economists, but that “those concerns have now allayed.”
Over the past six months, we’ve seen our experts present sophisticated and compelling AI-generated materials in collaboration with nonprofits, businesses, and government agencies.
List, the Kenneth C. Griffin Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago and Wal-Mart’s chief economist, said the main problem is that they don’t fully understand what they’re presenting.
“The words ring true,” he wrote. “But if someone pushes back just a little bit, the sandcastle collapses.”
Human expertise becomes more important than ever
List said he observed that AI often produced output that was either “very wrong” or “mostly correct.”
Spotting the difference, he said, requires the same critical thinking skills that created the underlying knowledge in the first place.
Deep understanding is also required to be able to defend the conclusions under scrutiny. “It’s very difficult to defend something you didn’t create,” he wrote.
He now believes that this dynamic strengthens the legitimacy of human expertise. He added that people who can distinguish between “almost right” and “right” are more valuable than ever.
“Creating knowledge is still important,” he says. “Maybe now more than ever.”
Overreliance on AI
AI researchers and some tech CEOs have warned of the risks of over-reliance on AI, particularly its co-dependence on large-scale language models and the gradual loss of work skills and critical thinking over time.
Software developers experienced that this week when Anthropic’s Claude AI model suffered several outages.
Some people told Business Insider that the disruption revealed how dependent their companies were on AI tools.
“Until Claude’s failure, I had no idea how people (myself included) had become so dependent on AI in such a short period of time,” IT student and software developer Satika Hettiarachchi wrote on X on Tuesday.
