The future has arrived in the form of ChatGPT.
So I'm late to the party on ChatGPT. Doesn't matter. I have to write about it, as it's just too groundbreaking to not.
I returned from break to find my coworker talking up ChatGPT. I had heard a few things already but folks had just referred to it as a chat bot. Umm, it's so much more. Once my buddy showed me the blog post it rendered when he gave it a simple topic suggestion and then the PowerShell script it created based on the idea he fed it, I realized I was looking at something far more than a chat bot. This was the promised evolution of Artificial Intelligence.
Like any other good coder, I started tinkering around and haven't stopped thinking about what I could or should be doing with this technology.
Here are my initial predictions and thoughts on how this will impact us and the world.
Always start with it
Basically, anytime you have something to do: research, guidance, recommendations, starting a coding solution, planning, scripting, you name it. Check ChatGPT first. Use it as something to do a baseline against, if nothing else. You should see your productivity go up and I won't be surprised if companies start to expect that as well.
Scaffold your code with it
If you have a product or idea for a program or app or coded solution, use this to get it scaffolded. It's not yet at a place where it can make complex solutions based on a multitude of feature inputs, but you could definitely ge there just by communicating with ChatGPT in chunks. The code may not be functional or perfect, but I can guarantee you will have something to start with much faster than anything else you've ever used. Plus, starting out something can feel tedious and repetitive and this just expedites it even more.
"Thinking" jobs are going to shrink, eventually
Is this a future that scares me a bit? Yes. We always associated robots with replacing manual labor but this is the moment I'm understanding that even the thinking jobs, like coding, writing, imagining, engineering could also be replaced. If nothing else, you'll need fewer and fewer people with the idea and the means and the code monkeys and designers can be replaced entirely. Andrew Yang's UBI is sounding more and more appealing. In all seriousness, as a father of 4, I worry about a world in which fewer and fewer people are needed to get things done, as it could allow for an even further divide in our already divided class system. In a world where people may be needed to "do" things less and less, I may be encouraging my children to get back to the basics and be sure that they are self-sufficient and capable of doing the jobs no one wants to do. It may be all that's left at the end - or get a job with SpaceX and hop of this rock lol.
Neuralink makes sense now
I knew that Neuralink would be something special, but now I feel like I can conceptualize it even for myself. I find myself wanting to treat ChatGPT as an extension of my own consciousness, even though it's working independently. Once I have fed it something and received information back, I can't unlearn it, so it becomes a part of me. I feel like this will be the outcome of a Neuralink that is paired with this type of underlying technology, at instantaneous speeds and interfacing directly with the brain. Kind of mind-boggling really.
That's my first impression of this groundbreaking technology. It is truly game-changing. It's our modern Oracle.
