You can’t deny technology. It happens all the time. Our lives are constantly changing on the back of it. Such is the way of humanity ever since we lifted that first flint. The only difference between then and now, a gap of perhaps 600,000 years, is the pace of change.
Eras are defined by our technologies, each evolution giving birth to a vast array of opportunities: bronze; iron; steam and; electronics. Just think how far things have changed even in your lifetime. From this perspective it is a great time to be alive.
Every time a new technology is introduced, the cry is always the same. This is going to replace people and take their jobs. It will lead to mass unemployment yet somehow we seem to cope, by creating new jobs and opportunities on the back of whatever comes along. In the main that is.
Artificial Intelligence, the application of human intelligence to machine learning, is no different. It is already doing many things that people used to do and soon it will have the power to replace many more of our roles, especially if your work is to make C by adding A and B.
Automated content generators are causing the latest wave of concern. ChatGPT is threatening to replace all journalists, authors, content and copywriters, website designers, call centre operators and even programmers. It’s a big claim and only time will tell if this is true. The results so far are impressive.
I am left wondering where this will all go. As automated content becomes better and better, even better than anything that the vast majority of us can create, there will be an equal development in understanding, interpreting and even responding to such content. Newton’s third law of motion comes into play, whenever two objects interact, they exert equal and opposite forces on each other.
Technologies will develop rapidly which can take away the tedious task of responding to content. It won’t be long before AI generated correspondence will be answered by AI tools. There will be no need for human intervention at all and the AI bots will live happily, or unhappily in their own little world, free from human interaction.
All that will be left for us to do is to lie on the sofa and watch Tik Tok. With AI generated content of course.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 