Citrini Research wrote a report that’s associated with Monday’s stock market spike down. Its report centered on the risk of heavy white collar job losses from AI’s alleged ability to do white collar work and completely replace those white collars.

For the entirety of modern economic history, human intelligence has been the scarce input. We are now experiencing the unwind of that premium.

And so on.

Not so much, though. It took more mental acumen to run the steam drill than John Henry needed to run his hammer. It takes more mental acumen to work a modern auto production line, with all of that automated equipment, than it did—and does—to work an artisan, unautomated auto production line. The move extends into the white collar milieu, also. It begins with requiring more mental acumen to check AI’s work than it does to work the spreadsheets or do the research oneself. It takes a great deal of mental acumen to ask the right questions and then give AI the tasks of answering them—and then checking AI’s responses. Creativity is something AI cannot do.

AI is good at the artificial part; it’ll be quite some time before AI gets good at the intelligence part. Alan Turing once said that when a computer can answer certain kinds of questions, they’ll be impossible to distinguish from humans. That doesn’t prove computers’—AI’s—superiority, though. Answering questions isn’t the same as asking them.