The Long-Game | 5 Ways ChatGPT & AI Will Change Society

What’s the horizon of ChatGPT & AI? Seemingly every few hours, we’re learning of the near-infinite permutations this technology will have in every industry. Some applications are simple and fun, some are sophisticated and powerful, others are downright alarming. But where is this all headed? Instead of focusing on immediate use cases, here is a first guess at some of the most important considerations on the societal scale – what this technology is positioned to do (positively and negatively) over the next decade writ large:

1.?We will be forced to fundamentally question originality.

Writers, composers, artists, and anyone using a computer to create “art” will need to find ways to dislocate what they can do from what is theoretically possible via some non-human, AI entity. Tech like Microsoft’s Sudowrite is a natural integration with ChatGPT and the auto-generation of certain stylistic writing and more (e.g., DALL-E 2) will put artists in a cyber-corner they’ve never experienced before. Graphic design and digital renderings were only the beginning. Artistic spaces will be partially or wholly absorbed by ChatGPT and inevitably more sophisticated technologies to follow. We will have to scramble in deciding the mechanisms of differentiation to keep one of the greatest qualities of being human – the capacity to create something beautiful, lasting and uniquely ours – distinct (or at least discernible) from AI. Depending on the domain, we may choose not to care, or to hold on for dear life. But it’s clear we will have to perpetually make these choices and be judicious in doing so.

2.?ChatGPT will alter education and learning in general.

The deterioration of originality and human-based creation will drastically change (a) what we decide to learn, and (b) our ability to assess whether an actual human is actually doing the learning. We saw preliminary attempts at this concept with things like “no-code” programming, but when this technology is adopted en masse, teachers of all stripes will need to completely redesign how and what we learn. I want them to live, but take-home essays are the walking dead—written applications of every kind will no longer have merit. How will we help children build certain fundamental skills when they become aware that they can simply portray that development, and graduate without really knowing how to think critically on their own? How could we even build a policy around this technology within education, in a nation where capitalist inevitabilities are taken as givens, and we’re simply left to react? What will these kids look like twenty years down the line? They’re probably the first to go on Survivor, but maybe they’ll have a new kind of fluency that makes them exponentially more prepared for a future of work that feels more 50:50 with AI. This is one of the most impossible-to-predict trends we’ll ever find, but the next few years will quickly reveal us unprepared to operate alongside this technology. It will be a painful transition characterized by wide-ranging experimentation and tremendous uncertainty.

3.??In-person and non-tech interaction will be at a premium.

It’s hard to say what fraction of our time will be tech-facing and what will be among peers in any given time period, but given all the potential for inauthenticity in the educational, commercial and artistic worlds, the capacity to produce while in-person and simply be a normal, present individual will only grow in importance. If all you do is drop-shipping and buy your socks in the Metaverse, this doesn’t apply. But if you reduced in-person interaction and playing fields are leveled behind the desk, what you can do impromptu and who you are face-to-face will play a more rarified, more crucial role.

4.?Productivity will leap.

There are ominous trendlines here to be sure, but it can’t be denied that while these technologies may eradicate a thousand specific lines of work (looking at you, “content marketers”), they are simultaneously the infrastructural analog of building dozens of bridges in a major metropolitan region. What’s phenomenal about this type of technology is the insane number of man hours that may ultimately be spent on more traditionally “human” work: how to strategically position your business, integrating ideas through free association, deciding who to meet with to get something done. If day-to-day routine tasks can be automated in tandem, bankers might even find time to get outside! In all seriousness, the combination of eliminating repeatable, low-level tasks and cross-industry integrations now possible through ChatGPT will inevitably reshuffle the workforce to higher-level pursuits.

5.?The psychology of internet use will change—if not crumble.

When the potential to manipulate is concentrated in the hands of a few major news networks or tech giants, many unaware of their aims are easily spellbound. Soundbite-style sensationalism and finely-tuned algorithms are the tools, but one essential ingredient is their ability to operate at a distance—to cloak their methods without you ever having a chance to see behind the curtain. When that capacity to manipulate is at our fingertips, we’ll have no choice but to question (in just about every communication scenario) whether we’re talking to a human being, or some sophisticated, human-sounding natural language model. This question will never leave us because we’ll all be aware of how we could perform that simulation ourselves. Discounting for now that offshoring your communication will make you worse at communicating when you step away from the desktop, there will eventually be no practical way of assuring genuine connection with someone on Slack, Linkedin or any other site. If a brain-dead recruiter spams 4,000 people with a job link and some perfectly-phrased collateral, will you actually be able to take it seriously now that you know it could’ve just been generate from a five-second prompt they put into ChatGPT? Can that same recruiter take seriously the hundreds of AI-constructed job applications she’ll now receive at 100x the pace? What about people who do online dating? Or run an e-commerce business? Or need telehealth? Or need online…anything? AI will be maximally abused, and it will help the laziest among us meet certain thresholds of apparent effort they normally never could or would have. It will also make viscerally clear to every single person with internet access just how easy it is to make it seem like you know something—or care.

And So It Goes…

As long as capitalism is our prevailing economic system and government regulators continue wrestling with the many conundrums of Bluetooth, these changes may not even be the most dramatic. And it may very well be the case that this ten-year forecast takes place in two. As members of society, we should be doing everything in our power to use ChatGPT and related technologies to speed us up, reduce over-work, and free up time to enjoy the more important things in life. In the meantime, we should remain vigilant and call out those who are already looking for opportunities to exploit, manipulate and dehumanize our world.