I once heard a quote that said, “The hardest part of being a butcher is knowing where to cut.” If you’ve ever eaten a cut of meat you know that the difference between a tender steak and a piece of meat that needs hours of tenderizing is just inches apart. Butchers train for years to be able to make the right cuts in the right pieces of meat with speed and precision. There’s even an excellent Medium article about the dying art of butchering.
One thing that struck me in that article is how the art of butchering relates to AI. Yes, I know it’s a bit corny and not an easy segue into a technical topic but that transition is about as subtle as the way AI has come crashing through the door to take over every facet of our lives. It used to be that AI was some sci-fi term we used to describe intelligence emerging in computer systems. Now, AI is optimizing my PC searches and helping with image editing and creation. It’s easy, right?
Except some of those things that AI promises to excel at doing are things that professionals have spent years honing their skills at performing. Take this article announcing the release of the Microsoft CoPilot+ PC. One of the things they are touting as a feature is using neural processing units (NPUs) to allow applications to automatically remove the background from an image in a video clip editor. Sounds cool, right? Have you ever tried to use an image editor to remove or blur the background of an image? I did a few weeks ago and it was a maddening experience. I looked for a number of how-to guides and none of them had good info. In fact, most of the searches just led me to apps that claimed to use some form of AI to remove the background for me. Which isn’t what I wanted.
Practice Makes Perfect
Bruce Lee said, “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.” His point was that practice of a single thing is what makes a professional stand apart. I may know a lot about history, for example, but I’ll never be as knowledgeable about Byzantine history as someone who has spent their whole career studying it. Humans develop skills via repetition and learning. It’s how our brains are wired. We pick out patterns and we reinforce them.
AI attempts to simulate this pattern recognition and operationalize it. However, the learning process that we have simulated isn’t perfect. AI can “forget” how to do things. Sometimes this is built into the system with something like unstructured learning. Other times it’s a failure of the system inputs, such as a corrupted database or connectivity issue. Either way the algorithm defaults back to a state of being a clean slate with no idea how to proceed. Even on their worst days a butcher or a plumber never forgets how to do their job, right?
The other maddening thing is that the AI peddlers try to convince everyone that teaching their software means we never have to learn ever again. After all, the algorithm has learned everything and can do it better than a human, right? That’s true, as long as the conditions don’t change appreciably. It reminds me of signature-based virus detection from years ago. As long as the infection matched the definition you could detect it. As soon as it changed the code and became polymorphous it was undetectable. That led to the rise of heuristic-based detections and eventually to the state of endpoint detection and response (EDR) we have today.
That’s a long way to say that the value in training someone to do a job isn’t in them gaining just the knowledge. It’s about training them to apply that knowledge in new situations and extrapolate from incomplete data. In the above article about the art of butchering, the author mentions that he was trained on a variety of animals and knows where the best cuts are for each. That took time and effort and practice. Today’s industrialized butcher operations train each person to make a specific cut. So the person cutting a ribeye steak doesn’t know how to make the cuts for ribs or cube steaks. They would need to be trained on that input in order to do the task. Not unlike modern AI.
Tom’s Take
You don’t pay a butcher for a steak. You pay them for knowing how to cut the best one. AI isn’t going to remove the need for professionals. It’s going to make some menial tasks easier to do but when faced with new challenges or the need to apply skills in an oblique way we’re still going to need to call on humans trained to think outside the box to do it without hours and days of running simulations. The human brain is still unparalleled in its ability to adapt to new stimuli and apply old lessons appropriately. Maybe you can train an AI to identify the best parts of the cow but I’ll take the butcher’s word for it.
