Instead of forever moving the goalposts by defining AI as “whatever the machine can’t do yet,” it merits tracking what GenAI and cannot do today, as well as what it might be capable of tomorrow.  

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The best research to date has identified GenAI’s current “jagged frontier.” That is, there are some tasks where GenAI materially augments human performance and others where it hinders human performance. The challenge is that the frontier is not only jagged but invisible. Our intuitions fail us at what the machine is, and is not, good for.

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Importantly, this is the worst GenAI will ever be. Silicon will continue to surpass carbon at all manner of cognitive tasks. Which is not to say humans are obsolete. While “computer” used to be a human occupation that will never return, and Excel displaced the vast majority of bookkeeping jobs, the total number of human jobs working with computers and numbers have only increased. We delegated brute-force calculation (thunking) so we can focus on higher-level analysis and decision making (thinking).* The machines have now reached a facility with language and images that they previously only achieved with math. The implications are profound.