ChatGPT and Reality

I spent several years arguing that automation is going to upend and transform the American labor market – I wrote a book called ‘The War on Normal People” on this topic that became a New York Times bestseller and now has 2,000+ 5-star reviews on Amazon. 

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Some people believed it.  Others didn’t.  But late last year, ChatGPT came along and opened a lot of eyes. 

ChatGPT is an AI chatbot developed by OpenAI that can generate stories, paragraphs, passages or poems from a simple query or text prompt.  The work product is on par with, or in some cases superior to, what a college-educated person could produce given much more time.  It has already absorbed tens of billions of data points and is constantly integrating more to become smarter, more efficient and more effective. 

Annie Lowrey in the Atlantic wrote about ChatGPT:  ”AI can do work currently done by paralegals, copywriters, digital-content producers, executive assistants, entry-level computer programmers, and, yes some journalists.”  Paul Graham of YCombinator commented, “"The striking thing about the reaction to ChatGPT is not just the number of people who are blown away by it, but who they are. These are not people who get excited by every shiny new thing. Clearly something big is happening.” 

This week on the podcast I interview Stephen Marche, a writer for the Atlantic who has extensively researched not just ChatGPT but other language processing AI and written several pieces about it.  What are the implications of AI getting smart enough to produce natural language? 

Said Stephen: 

“One of the biggest challenges is the potential for job displacement and economic disruption. As machines become more intelligent and capable, they will be able to perform tasks that were once thought to be the exclusive domain of humans. This could lead to job loss and economic inequality, particularly in industries such as manufacturing, transportation, and customer service.

Another challenge of AI is its potential to be used for malicious purposes. AI can be used to create more convincing deepfake videos and impersonate political figures online, which could have negative implications for the democratic process. Additionally, AI can be used to create autonomous weapons, which could have devastating consequences for global security.” 

Stephen doesn’t quite talk like that.  The above quote was generated by ChatGPT. 

What Stephen actually sounds like is, “Before 2017 I was a skeptic of digital humanities, but then the transformer happened and everything sped up.  The trend to me is much broader than just ChatGPT . . . people are catching up and seeing it happen.  ChatGPT is a bot that you can ask any question and it will produce a coherent response by going through billions and billions of parameters and is thus much more useful and practical for everyone.  Everyone has their holy cow moment using this stuff . . . this is going to change a lot of things.  I’ve had access to a more advanced AI [than the public] and what it can do is really freaky, including low-level chain reasoning.  If this is the Model T, someone is eventually going to make a Lamborghini and that will have a range of impacts on everything that involves language.”

Google recently sounded the alarm about what ChatGPT could mean for its search engine business.  If Google is concerned, how should the 2 million Americans who work at call centers think about their future?  About 62 million jobs are categorized by the Fed as routine cognitive or routine manual – about 44 percent of total jobs.  Oxford estimated that a similar percentage – 47% - of jobs are subject to automation. 

Source: Economic Data, The Federal Reserve Bank of Saint Louis

When I campaigned in 2020 did I think that the future would be here in 2023?  As William Gibson wrote, “The future is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed.”  Well it’s distributing fast.  The question is, what will we do about it?    

For my conversation with Stephen Marche, which I found fascinating, click here and for the War on Normal People click here.  To reform our political system to respond to the real challenges, check out Forward.  The machines won't save us, we're going to have to do it ourselves.