Trust, Business, and AI
Prelude
This essay exists because of several things going on in my life at the same time. I just had a chat with Dr. Daria Chrobok, a fellow human and lovely scicomm professional, and we started talking about how AI has impacted our business. At the same time, I recently read a piece called “The Firewall.” Lastly, I am dealing with some new and potential clients. It all got me thinking about trust, something that was on my mind yesterday night.
Trust and business go hand in hand. This I learned as I started to freelance. In school/university (and life) we are taught that a job involves security, regular payments, and insurance, that you pay your taxes and there is a government behind that gives you some guarantees. Capitalism was not built around that. Capitalism, as much as I dislike it, is a system built on entrepreneurship, on people believing that they have something that is worth investing time and money on, which will lead to revenue. Thus, for an entrepreneur to succeed, they need to accept a level of risk. This risk is trust. Trust in oneself or others who build alongside them. These are the main thoughts behind this article.
Business
I am building my freelance business along one maxim, which is, to me, the core of entrepreneurship: My ideas are worth more than my time or my creations.
When you work as a paid employee, oftentimes your hours are what you exchange money for. In most cases, you won’t need to do excellent work (although it will help in some cases). Most of the thinking will be done for you as well. You get tasks, and execute them, because they take time.
As a full time or freelance/self-employed you can also be paid for your output. Then, you charge for quality. An accomplished artist charges more than one who is not because, when asked to produce the same thing, the first makes something of higher quality.
But in both cases you are tasked with doing one specific action. Whoever dictates the action is the entrepreneur and businessperson. Because they chose to bet on an idea, and, should it pay off, they reap most of the reward.
You can argue that this applies to people who are paid for their output too. That knowing how to execute a task in the most optimal way is your thinking. This is true to an extent, but liability ends as long as the output is what the client decided on. If you order a specific dish at a restaurant and you do not enjoy it, but it is what you asked for, you are unlikely to complain. If they bring you a completely different dish, that is most often considered unacceptable.
Thus, it stands that to create something, you need a source for an idea, a source for quality, and a source for time. Often, it is the same person. Whenever it is not, business is created, as one pays another for their time, creation, or idea. Whenever that occurs, trust becomes involved.
Trust
With a similar analogy, once you go to a restaurant and you order, there is a level of trust, and trust implies risk. Because what if they don’t bring your food? What if it is not what you wanted? What if the quality is not good enough?
So, you invest in something that may or may not reap a benefit. Business is the same. When you require someone to execute an idea, you pay them, hoping that they will do a good job, and eventually lead to your goals (be it money, enjoyment, as with food or art, or anything else).
The problem is that, as humans, risk is very, very undesirable. We don’t want any risk, it upsets our amygdala. We want to have full control. Fallbacks. Options. This is why regular employment exists. However, I find it annoying when we apply the same thinking to entrepreneurship. Because in fact the idea of entrepreneurship welcomes risk. You risk something to gain something, and thus there is a chance of losing.
I talk to entrepreneurs all the time. Other freelancers or people who run companies, ones they founded or just lead. And all have fear. Fear is normal, but it leads us to wanting to “de-risk” everything. Investors want to de-risk. Companies want to be able to hire and fire whoever they want. They want to know exactly how much something will cost. How it will look. Which benefit will it bring, to the dot.
When I discuss my services, people often want assurances. With per-hour contracts, they want to know exactly how many hours it will take. With a flat fee, exactly what they will get out of it. They even want to know when I will have everything done, how long it will take me to reply to their messages, etc.
This inevitably leads to frustration. For me, because I get pressured, and it makes me not want to do the job if you ask for too many constraints (it is called “free”-lancing after all). For them, because they realize they can never control all the variables. And the job gets done worse than it should.
AI has made all of this worse.
AI
AI is the most unprofessional, uncapitalistic thing ever. For AI, there is no risk. You get straight answers, as straight as they come. Do XYZ, things are this or that way, and this is good and that is bad. Nuance goes out the window the moment you press enter on that prompt. It is optimized to diminish risk and increase trust.
When I did my bachelor in biology, I remember something that got drilled into us: “There is no universal truth in biology. Nothing is 100% true all the time. There are always exceptions to the rule.” AI would never say that. For it, things are black and white. And when you use it to learn something that you are not knowledgeable about it, it will give you direct, clear information. Ask AI to create a content strategy for you, and it will do so.
This is great for your amygdala.
Ask me about anything, and the first answer you probably will get is: “it depends.” Terrible for your amygdala.
The result is that people who are clueless and uneducated in a given field now use AI to learn, and obtain this “black-and-white” knowledge. I have been that “clueless and uneducated person” some times. But realizing that I cannot in fact trust what AI tells me very often has changed the way I use AI.
All this directly impacts business, and trust. When someone is faced with trusting a black and white output from AI or the uncertainty of my services, it becomes less and less likely they choose to go with my services. A professional opinion is nuanced from experience, something AI can never have, and moreover, it is not programmed to have.
When people choose to trust AI for their business, especially in matters where they lack expertise, they are not minimizing risk, just covering it up. When people believe that entrepreneurship and business can be done without trust, that a fixed action will lead to a fixed outcome, they are working outside the system.
Good business can only be conducted with a high degree of trust. This is the only way to risk and win. Otherwise you are just optimizing for margins. And AI is eroding the way people deal with uncertainty and the trust that they are willing to accept.
(My) Conclusion
Human connection and understanding cannot be replicated in a model yet. Your instincts can be good or bad, but if you have enough trust in yourself that you think these and your ideas are good enough, bet on them and become a true entrepreneur. Anything else is a parody of business.
And if you don’t you can train them through human interaction, not with a machine.
The best thing you can do is to deal with the fear and live with it. If you trust in yourself, bet on your business. Create that trust with someone else, and bet that they will do a good job for you, because they want to reap the rewards as well. There is no easy way to do this, but using the crutch that is AI will only make you worse at spotting trustworthy people and at taking risks.
The path of least resistance is seldom the one that leads to the best outcome. Go out, talk to people, try something new, and acknowledge the anxiety that it all brings. After all, living with that fear and anxiety is the one thing that AI will never be able to replicate, and what will bring you the most human connections and rewarding experiences, and that is something that will only be in higher and higher demand in the future.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading.
Darío out.
