I'm talking about The Six Million Dollar Man.......you know the one (no we don't Alan......you're old) Okay......heres the history lesson so you catch up......Steve Austin is an astronaut, test pilot and all-round American hero but during one test. he crashes spectacularly (it's true.....they showed the stock footage in the intro) and gets scooped up by a government agency, who rebuild him with bionic legs, a bionic arm, and one very impressive eye.
The voiceover is triumphant as Oscar Goldman (his boss) tells us, "we can rebuild him. we have the technology. We have the capability to make the world's first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before. Better... stronger... faster.
So when that plays in my head I am transported back to 7 year old me playing with the Action toy.....you coild peel back skin on his arm to see the circuits, press a button on his back and have him lift an engine!!!! And........best of all......LOOK THROUGH HIS BIONIC EYE !!! and see for miles (slight exaggeration).....then adult me pops up and says, yeah, but he still argued with his boss. Got emotionally compromised on missions
Every time I hear that, I think: yes, but he still argued with Oscar, got emotionally compromised on missions, and occasionally made some dodgy decisions that were, let's say, suboptimal for a six-million-dollar investment.
Sound familiar?
His upgrade wasnt really a replacement. The show understood what a lot of people seem to have forgotten in the AI conversation......You see, Steve Austin wasn't a robot, he wasn't even close. He was a deeply human man with bionic components. The bionic tech enhanced what he could do but it didn't replace who he was — his stubbornness, humour, and the tendency to go off-script when something didn't feel right was all there. That's the human shining through and crucially, they were the point.
Without the human in the middle of it, the bionic leg is just a very expensive piece of kit sitting in a government facility. It's Austin's "human" judgment, his relationships, his ability to read a situation beyond its surface — that's what made the upgrades valuable. The bionics needed the man. The man needed the bionics. Neither was the story on their own.
We're having the exact same conversation about AI right now, just with more LinkedIn posts and considerably less slow-motion running. In short. We have the technology (mostly) but to refer to Steve Austins upgrade programme, it wasn't without its issues. His bionic eye occasionally gave him information he didn't know how to use. His arm was extraordinarily powerful but required him to consciously hold back in everyday situations (would you want to shake his hand) and there were entire episodes built around the fact that his enhancements, impressive as they were, could malfunction, be exploited, or simply not account for the messy human context he was operating in.
The technology itself was remarkable, but also imperfect, situationally dependent, and entirely reliant on the person operating it making good judgments around its limitations.......why maybe they should have renamed it the "The Six Million AI man"
AI is extraordinarily capable in the right conditions and prone to confident wrongness in others. It can present responses so plausible-sounding and so completely made-up that you have to admire the audacity. Powerful in ways that require you — the human in the loop — to consciously hold back from just accepting everything it hands you. The parallel isn't an insult to either. It's actually quite reassuring. The flaws are sort of features.
Steve Austin's human flaws weren't a design flaw in the programme. They were the reason the programme worked at all. His empathy meant he could build trust with people that a pure machine couldn't. His moral compass occasionally overrode his orders in ways that turned out to be exactly right.
His imperfection made him useful in ways that a perfectly obedient bionic soldier would never have been.
AI has its own version of this. The way a language model approaches a problem — associatively, across enormous breadth, finding connections a human specialist might never make — is genuinely extraordinary. But it comes with genuine limitations baked in: it doesn't know what it doesn't know, it can reflect biases from the data it learned from, and it has no stake in whether its output is actually applied well. Those aren't reasons to fear it. They're reasons to stay in the room.
The flaws in both cases point to the same conclusion: you need the human and the technology together, each covering for the other's blind spots.
Steve Austin couldn't be replaced by his bionics. Your team can't be replaced by its AI tools. But in both cases, pretending the upgrade isn't there — or alternatively, pretending it's infallible — is where you run into trouble.
The Villains Were Never the Bionics
It's worth noting that in six seasons of The Six Million Dollar Man, the threat was never the technology. The bionics didn't go rogue. They didn't develop opinions about whether Steve Austin deserved to be in charge. The dangers always came from humans — people misusing powerful capabilities, pursuing power without accountability, or failing to think through consequences and that sounds like familiar territory.
The AI risk conversation that actually matters isn't "will the robot take over" — it's "who's building this, for what purpose, and who's checking the work." That's a governance question. An ethics question. A very human question. The technology is, in a sense, the least interesting part of it.
Steve Austin's biggest challenges were never his arm. They were the people who wanted to weaponise what his arm could do, or who underestimated him because they only saw the upgrades and missed the man.
Better, Stronger, Faster — Together
The ending of the Six Million Dollar Man was never Steve Austin transcending humanity. It was Steve Austin — fully, stubbornly, warmly human — doing remarkable things because he had tools that matched his ambition.
That's the destination worth aiming for with AI. Not replacement. Not fear. Not uncritical hype either, frankly — nobody needs a bionic eye that makes things up about its own prescription.
The goal is collaboration that's honest about what each side brings. Humans bring judgment, values, contextual wisdom, emotional intelligence, and the ability to care about outcomes beyond the immediate task. AI brings speed, breadth, pattern recognition at scale, and tireless availability.
Neither is enough on its own. Both, pointed in the same direction by people who've thought carefully about the destination?
We have the technology. We can make this better than it was.
That Learning Dude
