Will it? This is the most common question I get when I speak at conferences.
It will change it. Let me explain.
Recently, at Bluebeam's Unbound Conference, I had the chance to dive deeper and hear inspiring views into this very topic.
Duncan Wardle, captured the tension many people feel when he said, “Don’t be afraid of AI, be afraid of human stupidity.” Fear of the technology itself misses the point and prevents you from leveraging it; it’s how we choose to use it that matters.
Marc Nézet shared, “People, processes, and technology need to not only intersect—but also converge for greater impact.”
That convergence is exactly why AI is less about replacement and more about amplification. Marc left us with another deep reflection: Construction is about building infrastructure for the future. It’s fueling growth in the economy, people’s lives, communities, and our shared sustainability goals.
So, what tools can we leverage to get there? And how?
Can we overcome being paralyzed by AI fear? Is it taking or enabling our jobs?
Reality is much calmer than media portrays it. AI isn’t replacing humans, it’s augmenting them.
Here is one of three reasons why AI is working to amplify your job, not take it. Reasons 2 and 3 follow tomorrow.
1.) It’s not artificial intelligence, it’s intelligence augmentation (IA).
Lately, the term #AI has been used so much no one really knows what it means anymore (I’ll be writing about what AI really means later).
No matter your definition, all these new technologies still need humans in the loop.
Take ChatGPT. It doesn’t know what information you need or what you need an answer to. You still have to prompt it with what you want and iterate from there. It’s similar to construction planning and scheduling. A human needs to add the constraints (crews, cranes, weather, etc), then evaluate from there.
When we founded ALICE, I thought we would be able to replace the human scheduler. Even after working on AI in construction for 16 years (including my PhD), I’m absolutely convinced today that the human is not replaceable. Just note that people have been claiming that AI will replace humans for decades.
2.) Computers don’t have context
You can generate all the options in the world, but without human contextual understanding of reality and all it’s complexities you won’t know which option to choose or how valuable each option is.
Judgment, or taste, as many people call it, is something that is uniquely human. AI is excellent at ingesting large amounts of data and making it presentable, but it can’t decide what is valuable or beautiful. In this new era of technology, human expertise becomes more valuable, not less.
AI won’t take your job. ChatGPT has been around for three years and I’m still unaware of any mass unemployment.
3.) AI enables you to become the strategic orchestrator
You can buy an hour of Amazon EC2 server compute for 1.1 cents. That’s an insane amount of compute for effectively free.
If your career is based on crunching numbers without contextual understanding or deriving insights, I hope you’ll be happy with a salary of 1.1 cents. If on the other hand, you base your career on controlling and combining these AI systems to help you better decide and analyze, trust me, you’ll have a long and lucrative career.
These AI systems enable you to crunch vast amounts of data and generate millions of heavily optimized solutions. And they’re available to almost everybody.
The future belongs to those that control the most compute.