Why AI Will Not Take Over PM. Probably.

 

Before I walk away from the ProjectManagement.com theme of Artificial Intelligence, or AI, I want to point out another one of the difficulties it has to overcome prior to taking over the world: it involves those strategies or tactics that require a specific sequence of decisions or choices to be made correctly in order for the whole scheme to succeed. As I pointed out last week, AI “learns” through trial-and-error. Like the Hexapawn Robot, if the programming employing an aspect of AI comes to a result that has been defined as a failure, it will remove the last decision made prior to the failure as an option, and launch the simulation again.

Now consider the chess tactic known as a “sacrifice.” This happens when a player will offer the opponent one of the pieces in order to secure a superior position, leading then to the counter-taking of more material from the opponent, or even checkmate. The combinations that include a sacrifice that also lead to a forced checkmate (or irresistibly superior position) happen as a precise sequence. However, if an AI application were to execute only the sacrifice portion of the sequence in the combination, it would likely present as a blunder, or failure, since it would appear to be a set of decisions that resulted only in the loss of material. Life in general and the business world in particular are filled with these kinds of scenarios, where any given strategy or approach to a given challenge becomes nonsensical if the particular tactics are taken out-of-sequence, or evaluated prior to their intended completion.

Then we also have the issue of assigning responsibility, for both success and failures. This is most often done by evaluating the sequence of events from the success/failure determination, but in reverse, and assessing the quality of the choices leading to that particular action. For example, if a bridge collapses, we don’t blame the bridge, but those who designed, built, and/or maintained it. Depending on the precise nature of the failure, the knowable aspects of the collapse are collected and binned in order to draw reliable conclusions about the nature of the failure, and who specifically is responsible. Often there are more than a single responsible party or event, with catastrophes typically being the result of an entire series of breakdowns. My favorite example, the sinking of the Titanic, had many such breakdowns, including:

• The lookouts didn’t have binoculars, even though they were on board. Why not? Because the White Star Line had fired the purser who had the key to the lockers where the binoculars were stored prior to the beginning of the cruise, and nobody wanted to break into the lockers.
• More well-known is the fact that there weren’t enough life boats on board. Why not? Several reasons, but the two that jump out are (1) there weren’t regulations in-place that required sufficient life boats for all passengers, and (2) with its water-tight compartments, it was believed that the Titanic was unsinkable, meaning that no life boats would then be necessary.
• There are many more, but I’ll wrap with the fact that the aforementioned water-tight compartments weren’t topped by water-tight decks. After four compartments had been breached by the collision with the iceberg, the ship listed forward enough so that the water in the compromised sections simply spilled over into the ones aft, leading to its eventual sinking.

In short, very few decisions of import are made in isolation, or by a single person. They almost always impact other people’s decisions or circumstances, in ways that are impossible to foresee, much less quantify, thereby making any template- or algorithm-based solution untenable.

In the Titanic’s case, the review board found, in addition to the too-few-lifeboats problem, that the ship was travelling too fast for the icy conditions, and that its design made it more vulnerable than had been previously thought.[i] Note that, except for the ship’s speed at the time of the collision, none of the other causal factors could be attributed to a single person.

Now tell me that all of these parameters could have been identified and precisely quantified in such a way that an AI app, performing however many iterations of a simulated crossing of the Atlantic, could have suggested a usable alternative strategy. No database could have known the precise location of the iceberg, or the speed that Captain E.J. Smith would select (even with the available ice warnings), or that the fired purser had kept the keys to the locker with the binoculars, and on and on. Without the perspective of history, it’s clearly impossible.

In this respect, AI shares a flaw with the risk managers (no initial caps). It’s simply impossible to know all of the relevant parameters that go into assembling a strategy for attacking complex problems, much less quantify those parameters into an evaluating algorithm that could never fail catastrophically. Sure, AI can “learn” enough for robots to walk, run, or dance, and I’m fairly sure that, one day, they will be driving cars across a busy city at rush hour, and doing so reliably crash-free. But for discovering and executing strategies that require a very specific set of tactics to be employed in a very specific order, like Project Management, I have to believe that those decisions will remain with us humans.

For now.

[i] Retrieved from https://www.history.com/news/titanic-1912-accident-investigation-reports on September 9, 2023, 21:35 MDT.