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| Photo by Emiliano Vittoriosi on Unsplash |
The advent of any new pathbreaking technology has invariably been accompanied by hysteria about how the world that we know and love so much is facing an existential threat, the like of which it has never encountered before. This happened when the industrial revolution unfolded and it occurred when automobiles first made an appearance. The advent of cinema, for instance, was looked at with suspicion as was the beginning of air travel. Everything from computers and cell phones to machine learning and artificial intelligence has generated fear and misgivings as much as it has generated hope and anticipation for the future.
It is said that the changes being witnessed
on account of regular and unprecedented advances in technologies like robotics
and artificial intelligence are totally unprecedented and different from the
past. No less a person than the eminent scientist Stephen Hawking thought of
the development of artificial intelligence as a seminal event that could
eminently help mankind, sideline it or even destroy it. Other notables
like Bill Gates and Elon Musk too have sounded an alarm over the possibility of
artificial intelligence or AI not only fundamentally transforming humanity,
but overwhelming it as well.
In Chat GPT, the chatbot extraordinaire
that can not only converse like a human being but do a variety of functions hitherto thought to be the sole preserve
of flesh and blood people, people see the worst predictions about the dangers
posed by AI coming true. They fear for not just their jobs, but also their
ability to live their lives as fully independent and free-thinking individuals.
Alarmist, perhaps. But with the maker of
Chat GPT, Sam Altman himself saying that the future of AI is both awesome
and terrifying, especially if things don’t turn out well for us, the
jury is out on where technologies like Chat GPT end up taking us.[1]
With Google waiting in the wings to launch Bard, its version of Chat GPT things
are about to get a lot more interesting. To quote Dickens, we may be headed to
the best of times and the worst of times. The only thing that we don’t know is
if it will be the former and the latter, only the former or only the latter.
What is particularly disconcerting about
Chat GPT is the fact that it will perpetually be a work in progress, getting
better and better at what it does better than humans and there is no stopping
it. Where that will lead us with this technology in the years to come is anybody’s
guess. Already, people in the content creation and writing profession, lawyers,
coders, graphic designers and others are beginning to worry about the future
viability of their line of work. “Are we
destined to go the way of the dodo, or do we still have a profession with a
future?,” they might well be asking themselves already.
Well, it seems that most people can relax,
as they may yet keep their jobs for a very long time, as Chat GPT is nowhere
even close to possessing the full set of skills that humans bring to the
various professions mentioned above. That is not to say, it won’t happen
eventually, but by the time it does, depending upon your age, you will have
grown too old to care, or would have learnt some other skill that would be apt
for the time that you would be living in. For now, an imminent mass adoption of
a still nascent technology like Chat GPT is more likely to cause large-scale
dysfunction on account of its lack of subtlety and discerning ability than it
is going to on account of it making human beings redundant and idle.
For now, it is nothing more than an
assist-tool that will only help you perform your job better and more
efficiently-something like a battery-assisted e-bike. You can still pedal but
will find the going easier. As a matter of fact, AI-powered technologies like
Chat GPT are likely to help give a fillip to creativity amongst humans,
providing them new and exciting pathways that provide myriad opportunities to
both creators and consumers of content.
The thing about all new technologies is
that it scares you at first, but then you get used to it and carry on with life
the way we always have. Chat GPT is another technology, that will soon become
something that exists and does its job of helping us perform our jobs better. Heck,
we managed to figure out how to deal with Covid-19, with all the really scary
experiences it made all of us experience. Chat GPT is hardly a scourge of the
employed. It is more like the flavour of the times. Let’s see how the cookie
crumbles.
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