Two parallel ?I”s giving the trend: from Integration to Interpretation

In the early 2000s, I owned a home computer thanks to my sister, who was studying PC photography.

I easily gave away the typewriter as a gift from my father, with which I had once "printed" a school leaflet, "Us too!", which had caused enthusiasm among my pals.

I did so, because it seemed to me that "us too" has started to term the movement to another stage, requiring fast access to a computer. I felt so not because I had any special ability to understand an incipient phenomenon, but because by then I was a fervent subscriber to all the libraries in the cities I was in, even only for my school vacation. I knew how to search printed information quickly, even to read diagonally to find the idea "on the spot".

Therefore, the internet with its keyword searchable information brought into my home some invaluable libraries, and the advantage of searching without browsing paper pages.

More than 20 years have passed since then, and the information on the Internet has become more and more vast. At the same time, however, we are faced with the diversity of data on a single topic and the inability of a user to grasp the essentials of such a large amount. Plus the impossibility of discerning the truth among the many fakes.

Out of this need for integrated information, the chatbot ChatGPT was born. Let's face it, this chatbot answers admirably at least to the first dilemma, because it interrogates it all and extracts the essential. Errors do exist, after all it happens for any software newly implemented. Of course they will improve it over time, but even so, the errors now are non-essential for what the average person needs.

The fact:

I never imagined advanced Internet search tools or electronically archived information or instant access to topics of interest from around the world, nor ChatGPT. I didn't imagine them when I was using my typewriter. But I dare to write my opinion about it today:

1. This chatbot will simplify our lives, taking us to another stage of technological progress.

The one in which we will receive the information integrated, but it will not be enough.

2. ChatGPT will not be used equally.

Its access has been restricted to a paid monthly subscription, making it a product that not everyone can afford.

3. In a world now where many "study" and "profess" on equal terms, it will be distinguished who will know how to interpret the integrated "result" returned by ChatGpT, regardless of the field.

Such a person will not lose his job and will use the information received to increase his professional efficiency.

4. The concept of "functional illiteracy" requires the full attention of a nation. Effective education involves primary school students in projects requiring their research, understanding, integrating and presenting skills.

The race is not yet lost, but the start certainly is, for those many who do not have the context, ability or desire to understand the need for such action.

5. Several professions will be abolished, you know the statistics and you may have felt the chills if you found yourself among the targeted ones.

It has already happened so many times before in history. And other occupations were created, which no one could imagine before, because necessity comes with confrontation. The same is happening now.

6. We are likely to see huge demand and a real exodus to manual trades of many who need to retrain.

The trend is given by pleasure and need, so don't be skeptical. In recent years, small artisan entrepreneurs, offering food or household and clothing items, have relaunched almost all over Europe. Maybe now is their turn.

?Instead of conclusion

In no historical era before, have the best trained or "trendy" worked, while their peers sat...

...but there were times when people had to retrain professionally. It just depended on the context.

It's not quite realistic to say: "ChatGPT has replaced me, I have no choice, I'm starving!" At least not yet, and I can't imagine easy times ahead either, selection never meant that.

The important thing now is to analyze the opportunities for this change, to act, and to recall that a quarter of a century after the widespread use of the Internet, rare information is still found in libraries and not on the Internet, and the typewriter comes as a fancy gift.