ChatGPT

A few weeks ago I couldn’t sleep, so I decided to see what all the fuss was about concerning ChatGPT, OpenAI’s large-language model Artificial Intelligence (AI) program that’s designed to, well, automatically write stuff – that’s the highly technical definition that I just made up. I also watched about a dozen YouTube videos, half predicting that AI will end civilization as we know it, and the other half claiming AI’s just a Big Tech hoax. After running a few amateurish queries in ChatGPT, put me down in the “end civilization as we know it” camp.

Okay, some of the grander claims regarding AI may be overblown – they always are – but the handwriting is on the wall: ChatGPT already produces better sales copy than 40% of the ads I see and is equal or superior to about 90% of the internet “content.” AI’s rate of growth is amazing and scary. I last checked on AI about two years ago, and it couldn’t tie its own shoes. Today, it aced the SATs, breezed through the famous Turing Test, and is off to Harvard. AI may never replace the best of the best humans, but soon it’s definitely going to eat the lunch of the Silver Medalists and below.

Now, according to The Gospel of the Jetsons, this is a good thing: we’ll all be untethered from the drudgery that is most jobs and have oodles of free time to pursue all the happiness the Declaration of Independence promised. As a kid I believed that.

The adult me is more inclined to think that because of ubiquitous AI and automation we’re headed for a menacing dystopia where a handful of very lucky and unimaginably wealthy potentates capriciously rule over vast herds of subsistence-level human cattle. In the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries many desperate women were forced to prostitute themselves to wealthy clients just to eat. Sometimes I feel that’s kind of the objective of the New Feudalism: to coerce the peasants – us – into performing services of a highly personal nature that violate our dignity, morals, and religions, but I digress.

There’s no doubt that AI and automation in general are quickly going to become cheaper, more versatile, and more powerful than human labor, more powerful than we can currently imagine. Hopefully I’ll be dead before this transmogrification is complete, but my kids and their kids probably won’t. We fogies have a hard time wrapping our heads around it because it’s easy to get stuck in the Eighties, but the new economic challenge facing us isn’t scarcity, but abundance. The Few will produce more than enough for themselves and the Many. What are we supposed to do with the displaced workers? Stick to the old Protestant work ethic and create menial make-work jobs just so people can “earn” the right to exist? Sounds like a Nineteenth Century prison to me. Or are we going to accept the idea of paying people to <gasp> NOT WORK? Yeah, I know, the concept rattles every nerve in my body, too, but I don’t see many alternatives. In a world where cheap, widespread automation or AI can outperform most humans in almost every category, what do humans do?

We need to figure it out NOW.