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Good for Now

Have been playing around with Chat GPT for personal and work based needs and am excited and also intimidated to see what it is able to do. The first thought that comes to mind is does this make my job replaceable  by creating the perception it can do some parts of it, and the slightly correlated one is do I bring anything to the party that this thing cannot (yet). These questions apply to every knowledge based profession. 

For example, this thing can make a big dent in the legal business if say its knowledge graph  covered all of Westlaw and every court filing ever made in America. That is only a start, there is no end of additional data points that could be used to enrich that graph. That should in theory give the bot enough ground truth to help a pro-se litigant file their pleadings and prepare their arguments - no need to waste endless time and money on lawyers. Arguably it will have access to data and processing power that far outstrips what any legal professional can match. 

While things may not get to that point right away for any number of reasons, it can still be very disruptive. A lot will depend on how business choose to use Chat GPT or its industry/domain specific incarnations. It is one thing to use it as a way to empower employees and make them significantly more productive but quite another to use it to phase out the human workforce. We should learn lessons from large scale factory automation. 

Jobs performed by people with a 4-year college degree, which were once largely immune from automation, could be the hardest hit. These include market research analysts, sales managers, programmers, management analysts, and engineers. Positions that are “heavily involved in pattern-oriented or predictive work” are expected to be “especially susceptible to the data-driven inroads of AI,” according to the analysis.

It may not replace the way internet search works but influence how the concept of search evolves in the future

Google Brain is a top-tier AI team, and Google owns DeepMind, perhaps the most powerful deep-learning engine available today. In essence, LaMDA, which Google announced last year, can do the same thing as ChatGPT: speak with people about anything and everything. In fact, according to Google developer Blake Lemoine, it was so realistic that it could feel or perceive things. Google also announced that it would provide LaMDA support to its voice assistant, Gmail, Docs, and Drive services.

For now Chat GPT is a very capable and fast assistant that can be a tremendous productivity multiplier. What it will become in the future will depend a great deal on the abuse we subject it to. In a sense it will reflect our shared humanity including the darkest parts of it and if the shadow is long enough it may take over what is good about it. It does not help that it is already a fluent bullshitter and in a world where real facts are already hard to come by, this does not help. The bigger question all of this poses is what is it to human and how much does it matter to businesses today to be represented by the collective humanity of its workforce. 

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