Exploring the Pros and Cons of Disruption: From Fear to Excitement
Carolyn R?hm
Entrepreneur | Founder | Innovating with Integrity | Creating Impactful Change
ChatGBT - the 5th horse of the apocalypse?
Sinner? Saviour? Dystopian? Utopian?
The end of the world or a brave new one?
As Charles Dickens so eloquently phrased it in the opening lines of “A Tale of Two Cities”:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
We, humans, seem to love polarising things; it’s either?AMAZING???Or it’s the harbinger of doom and gloom…
The furore surrounding ChatGPT is nothing new
??: People will stop reading ? OR it will advance democracy ??
??: It will be a threat to people’s privacy ? OR it will cure loneliness ??
??: It will show us new cultures, and we’ll be able to go places we can’t go ?? OR our country will be filled with zombies who cannot think for themselves ?
??: It will enhance communications and access to information ?? OR it will increase loneliness and enable the spread of misinformation ?
The list goes on and on.?And what you may have noticed, in many cases, both the positive AND negative aspects hold true.
In November, ChatGPT became publicly available, that’s about three months ago.?And in that relatively short space of time, I have seen a?LOT?of commentary.?Overwhelmingly, in most of my feeds, it has been skewed towards the doom-and-gloom variety.?The most common themes have been:
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Other concerns raised include the working conditions of the people who label the data that the model is trained on.?Some are concerned about broader ethical concerns, such as who is accountable for what is produced. Who has ultimate control, and what is the impact on society?
To be clear – these are all perfectly valid questions.
I wasn’t going to write about ChatGPT – there has been so much written already, I wondered whether I had anything to add to the conversation.
The more I think about it, the more I think that we need to step back from the “either A or B” thinking that currently dominates conversations.?We need to step back from the highly emotive language being used.
The genie is already out of the bottle; this technology is here, and it is not going away.?I think the conversation should look at how we leverage this technology.?How do we ensure that our schools and universities teach critical thinking??How do we ensure that people continue to use these critical thinking skills in life?
In the same way that calculators were seen as cheating back in the day, and students were expected to memorise screeds to text, why is that important, when it is freely available on the internet??
We must prepare our children, our future generations, for their future, not our past.
How do we teach people to look past the first, usually emotional, response, to a more considered approach?
There are many things that we wish we could uninvent; nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, plastic, and adding lead to just about everything!?But time only moves in one direction, so, in my view, instead of lamenting, we may as well roll with it.
I think the old adage, that the only certainties in life are death and taxes ought to be updated:
The only certainties in life are death, taxes and change.?Things will change, and they will continue to change.?Even the rate of change is accelerating.
There may not be much I can do about what is changing around me; however, I most certainly can control my mindset regarding what is happening around me.?Personally, I find the future, filled with AI, and smart technologies, wonderfully exciting.