INFORMS Open Forum

  • 1.  Fun (or scary) Post: AI

    Posted 03-27-2025 17:31

    What is your biggest fear related to AI? Or do you think the fears being shared in the media are baseless? Can't wait to read your responses!



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    Jill Capello
    Membership Associate
    INFORMS
    Catonsville MD
    jcapello@informs.org
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  • 2.  RE: Fun (or scary) Post: AI

    Posted 03-28-2025 11:17

    > What is your biggest fear related to AI?

    My biggest fear is that the general public will trust AI more than it trusts humans, and not understand that the AI can be incorrect, just like humans can be.



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    -Irv Lustig
    Optimization Principal
    Princeton Consultants
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    Original Message


  • 3.  RE: Fun (or scary) Post: AI

    Posted 03-30-2025 15:11

    AI is rising at a time when human attention spans are getting shortened by social media. This makes it easier for AI to slice through a lot of jobs because they have been inadvertently decontented by enabling tasks to be done with short attention spans and little thought.

    The thoughtful remainders are likely to be the ones building and managing the AIs.

    I'm afraid that the gap between the AI-enabled and the AI-displaced can create another fault-line in society. 



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    Rahul Saxena
    RevInsight.com
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    Original Message


  • 4.  RE: Fun (or scary) Post: AI

    Posted 03-30-2025 16:50

    Jill,

    My biggest fear is the typical overreaction by business to the media hype on the technology.

    Most "Generative AI" applications are band aids on the wounds caused by poor processes. ML holds the most promise/benefits, but requires more data and data management investment than most companies are willing to take on. I personally think in our current situation (i.e., wave of retirements, skill deficits, digital transformation) we should focus on the more explicit knowledge of workers by reexploring knowledge-based expert systems.  Thanks!



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    John Huffman
    Senior Technical Fellow - Emeritus
    Spirit Aerosystems Inc
    Wichita KS
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    Original Message


  • 5.  RE: Fun (or scary) Post: AI

    Posted 03-31-2025 18:55

    Scary thought: After achieving Artificial General Intelligence, the courts grant AGIs built/based in the US the right to vote ... increasing the already substantial proportion of the electorate prone to hallucinations.



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    Paul Rubin
    Professor Emeritus
    Michigan State University
    East Lansing MI
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    Original Message


  • 6.  RE: Fun (or scary) Post: AI

    Posted 03-31-2025 22:30

    My biggest fear related to AI is that we'll become overly reliant on it for every decision, big or small. Instead of using AI as a "bicycle for the mind" to enhance our thinking, we risk handing over the handlebars entirely-losing critical thinking, creativity, and agency in the process. When we stop questioning and start deferring, we don't just become lazier thinkers-we risk becoming dumber as a society.



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    Wei Sun
    Senior Research Scientist
    IBM Research
    Yorktown Heights NY
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    Original Message


  • 7.  RE: Fun (or scary) Post: AI

    Posted 04-01-2025 15:29

    Wei,

    You raise an important point. I've seen something similar with online help forums (and, to some extent, search engines). Once upon a time you learned to hunt down bugs by bisecting code or liberal use of print statements, and you learned to identify incorrect constraints by substituting a feasible solution into an optimization model and find the constraint(s) it violated. These days, while most forum users still seem to make a reasonable attempt to solve their problems before posting them, I see a lot of people whose first instinct after running into a problem is to post it and let someone else deal with it. I would call that lazy thinking. Throw in a propensity for believing the AI's solution without taking a hard look at it, and things get dicey quickly.



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    Paul Rubin
    Professor Emeritus
    Michigan State University
    East Lansing MI
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    Original Message


  • 8.  RE: Fun (or scary) Post: AI

    Posted 04-01-2025 12:28

    Massive displacement of mid-to-middle-upper level white collar jobs (read: layoffs with little chance of hiring elsewhere). Most noticeably, this will further fracture the current makeup of the Democratic Party in the US which mostly depends upon upper middle class college educated urbanites and suburbanites.

    GenAI makes mistakes, but in certain spaces is pretty good at getting to a 75th-80th percentile answer, quickly and cheaply. And most white collar workers are at the 80th percentile or lower. We see this most prominently now in writers and artists who are struggling to get work, but it will expand. How many people have you met whose regular corporate jobs was basically to do the same pivot table over and over, and email results?

    I'm fairly pessimistic about most of this. I predicted the progression of messaging here. It went from "AI won't take your job, it will help you do your job better" to "AI will remove the lower-value-added work" to "AI won't take your job, someone using AI will" to "AI will take jobs, how can we adjust?"

    If you're at the Analytics+ conference, we can talk more about it.

    Ralph



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    Ralph Asher
    Founder, Data Driven Supply Chain LLC
    Data Driven Supply Chain LLC
    Minneapolis MN
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    Original Message


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