Augmentation Today, Replacement Tomorrow
Cluely is a peek into the future
Roy Lee, the creator of Interview Coder, is out with a new product: Cluely. The idea behind Cluely is that you can use AI to to cheat on anything.
“Cheat on anything” is the clickbait tagline, but obviously the Cluely team casts it in an optimistic light.
The reaction is predictably polarized. Some people think it’s the coolest thing since sliced bread, others think it’s an agent of evil that will accelerate our decline into a low-trust society. I tend to agree with the latter perspective, but that’s not the real problem here, which I haven’t seen anyone articulate yet: this provides another bridge to total replacement.
In other words, if Cluely can do all your thinking for you, why do we even need you?
If you’re on a date, and the AI is doing all your talking for you, what do you really have to offer the other person besides a warm body? Now, imagine that it takes years before life-like robotics exists. That is years we spend conditioning ourselves to 1) conversing with an AI and 2) forgetting how to actually converse with people. With this backdrop, would we really expect people to choose humans over humanoid robots when that time comes?
Or, let’s take a salesman that uses Cluely to great success. Her sales are through the roof because the AI is basically handling the sales calls for her. What exactly is stopping the AI from just doing the job itself?
You can repeat this exercise for a CEO. Or software engineer. Or plumber. Or teacher. Or anything that can requires intelligence. In that way, the Cluely team is exactly right. Why do anything, when an AI can do it in seconds? They just fail to take the logical next step. If it can augmented with AI, it can be replaced by AI.
None of this is Cluely’s fault. This future is inevitable, and if it weren’t them, it would be just be someone else. But, their release does show that this future is now uncomfortably close.