AI can perform hard but not complex tasks

AI can beat world champions at chess, diagnose cancer better than doctors, and write code faster than senior developers. But ask it to deploy that code without breaking your entire system? Good luck.

Here's what's happening: AI has mastered hard but not complex.

Hard = high skill, clear rules. Like scoring the perfect free kick or calculating derivatives in your head. Difficult? Absolutely. But the path from input to output is predictable.

Complex = interdependent chaos. Like building software that doesn't crash when one service goes down, or managing a team where every personality affects every other personality. Small changes create massive, unpredictable ripple effects.

Current AI is basically the world's most sophisticated pattern matcher. Feed it millions of examples of hard problems and it becomes superhuman. But the real world is complex. Complexity isn't about more data or better patterns - it's about navigating webs of relationships where 2+2 might equal 5, or purple, or accidentally delete your database.

This is why AI can master Go (hard) but your "simple" software update still breaks three unrelated features (complex). Why it can write perfect functions but can't architect systems that won't fall over when Jim clicks the wrong button.

The next AI breakthrough won't solve 'hard' tasks - it'll be solve complex ones. And that's a fundamentally different challenge than anything we've solved before.