Labor Day honors the dignity of work and emphasizes that the economy is powered by people who perform essential daily jobs. In 1998, the ProfitCents expert system converted complicated financial numbers into plain English and remains in use; it helped business owners make better decisions and attracted bank adoption. Some users over-relied on the system and outsourced discernment to a machine, turning tools into substitutes for decision-making and common sense. Today attention on AI is intense, with claims it will replace many human roles. Computers excel at crunching data but lack thinking, judgment, and the ability to say "I don't know."
At the risk of pulling rank, let me give a little background. In 1998, I built an "expert system," ProfitCents, that converted complicated financial numbers into plain English. It is still in use today. The expert system was an early predecessor of AI. The idea was simple: help business owners understand their own financial statements in ways that would allow them to make better decisions. It worked well enough that banks began using it, which was both gratifying and alarming.
Instead of using it as a tool to inform their decisions, some lenders used it as a replacement for decision-making. Just like credit scores today, which are, at best, meaningful heuristics but are grossly overused, the technology sometimes became a substitute for common sense. That was never the point. A number on a page, or words spit out by a program, cannot replace the crucial function that we hope humans have: common sense and judgment.
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