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Our Glorious Future with AI
Brilliant master or useful idiot?
The term “AI” has been commodified to mean any clever machine. It is used to describe everything from your smart thermostat to the personal data mining program the company used to determine if you get the job. Today, in 2023, the unfortunate fact with which we must all contend is this: Every AI in the world is nothing compared to ChatGPT. If you don’t get the job, that’s a problem. If a hundred industries disappear, that is a crisis. When you have to work to find reliable news, that is a problem. When no information of any kind can be trusted, that is a crisis. I intend to demonstrate that those crises are written into the very guts of ChatGPT.
OpenAI’s development of ChatGPT should not be thought of as a really cool improvement on a common technology. It should be thought of in the same way we might think of the discovery of petroleum and its introduction into every facet of human life. There will be no escaping it and everyone will find themselves using it whether they realize it or not. Hyperbole does not begin to encompass its full import.
I am an engineer but I am not an expert in AI. I have spent some time training a neural network and I have developed several expert systems. I have seen how clever mere software can appear and I am not strictly skeptical of how far AI can go. I…
