Consulting & AI

An article in the Economist this week suggested AI a major threat to consultants, whose primary goal is the provision of expertise. I remain unworried. Consultants make their living providing specialized expertise to cover rare situations. However, most consultants are actually consultants, but contractors: you pay them to get a job done that you can't (or don't want) to do yourself. The name is simply a matter of prestige: more like Boston Consulting Group, less like the local plumber.

Of course, every contractor-consultant aspires to being a proper consultant, by providing "thought leadership", which is simply a way of saying "I have thought about this a great deal and have useful things to say", in the sense of having useful advice. Of course, the consultant-contractor dichotomy is blurred in the other direction--while some of the BCG folks do 'strategy', rather a lot more do 'implementation', (although they build you a new organizational structure rather than a new bathroom). 

"You can only write what you know about" and so a great deal of consulting is knowing about things. Which requires rather a lot of learning about things and doing research about them. Consultants get accused of "Let me Google that for you", but that sort of misses the point--you could Google it for yourself, but since your consultant is really a contractor, you really are paying for someone to Google it for you. 

An aside on that: Googling something requires ever more wading through an SEO optimized and enshittified web, but also the ability to extract content from our society's least enshittified corpus: publicly available PDFs. This category includes peer reviewed research, think tank reports, local government documents, for-profit and non-profit think pieces, etc. An advantage I strongly suspect will remain, because while much web-content is open for the scraping under a generous fair-use doctrine, a PDF has a much better (more litigable) claim to being 'published' and copy-righted than a blog post. 

So, in the context of AI, an increasingly valuable portion of the service a consultant provides (compared to an AI) is the able to discriminate between high-value and low-value content, in terms of quality and relevance. Of course, all consultants use AI, but I find arguments against AI use tediously familiar to childhood injunctions about using spell-check. My (unassisted) spelling is indubitably worse, but the productivity of my time is vastly greater. It should tell you something that we no longer employ whole armies of copy-editors in document production. The real question is if your consultant is making efficient use of AI (to produce analysis tools and draft documents) and scam artists (using AI to produce analysis and review documents). 

If it's something I could task a junior analyst with, it's suitable for AI. (To the very real peril of the entire class of junior analysts, who of all people should focus on using AI to become much more productive). Which raises the issue of the use of AI by junior analysts--if they give you something an AI could have produced, what is their value? But that only suggests a misuse of analyst time and capacity, like paying someone to spellcheck a document. 

But it requires analytical capacity to understand the capabilities of AI, and how to apply it well. And that capacity is sadly lacking. It's easier to spurn and disparage AI tools rather than learning to use them (and teach others to use them). But it's a hard time--AI is not widely adopted, and where it is widely adopted, it's not necessarily well used. Things are changing so fast that there really aren't best practices in the professional use of AI--merely cautionary tales about the misuse of AI. But I expect that's also a source of competitive advantage: Everyone claims expertise in AI and AI use, but it will take rather a bit longer for consultant clients to be able assess actual facility with it. 

As an aside, if you can't afford to hire someone competent to assess and manage a consultant/contractor's work, you have no business contracting something out. The risk of buying a 'pig in a poke' is simply too great, and fly-by-night consultants feeding on the credulity ignorant have been a risk since the days of court sorcerers. An interesting parable for AI--if you can't assess the quality of what your AI produces, you have no business using an AI. Which is perhaps the fundamental skill senior analysts should be teaching their juniors.

Honolulu rail system

In 1966, then-mayor Neal S. Blaisdell suggested a rail line as a solution to alleviate traffic problems in Honolulu, stating,

 "Taken in the mass, the automobile is a noxious mechanism whose destiny in workaday urban use is to frustrate man and make dead certain that he approaches his daily occupation unhappy and inefficient."^[20]

The failure of Honolulu to get their act together is staggering. It's an island. It has to import cars by air, and fuel by ship. All the urban development is constrained to a tiny strip along. The lack of a mass-transit system is quite puzzling. Takes a bit of reading to get to the core of it, but looks like the cause is political: it's a contest for space between mass transit and cars. (No surprise there--it's a fundamental conflict in urban transportation). And BRT doesn't seem to have entered the conversation until recently; prior to effective BRT, 'rapid' transit meant rail.

Should Honolulu have rail? Probably not. Circa 2000, rail probably looked reasonable. But that was before Curitiba pioneered BRT, and demonstrated that heavy-rail levels of capacity were possible using rubber-tracked vehicles with internal combustion engines.

Technically speaking, there are only two cases where rail transit is justified:

1. You already have a rail transit system, and you are building an additional corridor that will interconnect with it, and building more rail will eliminate the 'change of gauge' problem that continuing along a corridor would otherwise require a transfer to another vehicle.
2. A railroad line/corridor/ROW already exists and can be re-used/repurposed.  

Looking at the proposed rail line, looks like Honolulu meets neither of these criteria.  So why rail? Cars.  As I mentioned  previously, it's a fight for urban space, a fight for travel right-of-way. It proved politically easier to spend billions to build a curious heavy rail/commuter rail/light rail hybrid, rather than take roadway right-of-way from cars. (Choosing between pain today or pain tomorrow, and the public will always take pain tomorrow--something politicians endlessly exploit).  

If you can't make use of the surface right-of-way (which has been politically allocated to cars), then you have to use separated guidway--either elevated or underground. My understanding is that as a volcanic island, there is no 'digging' to be done on Honolulu: building anything underground means dynamiting through igneous rocks of various types. And elevated is cheaper than underground, regardless. (Digging through air is pretty cheap, I understand). So after the political decision to allocate all the surface space to cars was made, elevated was the only place to stick a train. But elevating a train isn't cheap: It's like building a highway consisting solely of bridges. And so the cost is in the billions. And so the project is politically tendentious. Complicating this, Hawaii has zero experience building rapid transit of any sort. 

Sadly, this is a common problem across America: we've not built grade separated transit in decades, and hence there is no professional experience in doing it. All the experience is European and Chinese. And yet the 'benevolent' requirements of 'Buy American' provisions for the FTA condemns U.S. rapid transit to autarky. Rather than import (and localize) foreign expertise, we have to 're-invent the wheel', making all the same dumb mistakes. 

Why? Because this is America, and we don't have a national rail agency. It's a federal system: the Feds fund it, but the local agency builds it. And to do that, every local agency has to learn how to do it. Which is impossible, and so most local agencies rely on consultants to provide the expertise.

And as a consultant, I can tell you, there is a strong incentive to over-state your expertise, 'stretch' related qualifications, and magnify that aspect of related projects. Because that's how you win work, and if you don't win work, you don't eat. And that includes practices like underbidding the work (saying you can do it in less time/for less money than the task will actually take). When public projects go sideways, the reasons for it are predictable.