When the iPhone came out people became millionaires with a flashlight app. With chatGPT somebody will invent something remarkably simple, hook it up to a chatbot and become filthy rich.

“Cognitive skills will be rewarded as never before. It will be more important to think clearly, as ideas will become a form of wealth.”

Name the book…

I teach middle school students English for a living and will thus answer this question from the lens of English educators.

I find myself increasingly relying on ChatGPT as a tool to complement my teaching and learning. Just yesterday, I was unceremoniously tasked to come up with a reading comprehension exercise for the graduating students in my school. The tried-and-tested method would be to look for suitable articles in periodicals like Readers’ Digest, but I decided that writing my own passage would save me much time and hassle. So I wrote one personal recount on the way home.

This morning, I logged on ChatGPT, asking it to make “suggested edits to my writing” and give inputs like readability level and word count. ChatGPT edited my writing within minutes. I had no qualms using it to set comprehension questions given that I was the creator. I see ChatGPT as polishing a raw diamond.

In fact, I think ChatGPT will lead to an increased focus in writing skills because we all know that if we give it rubbish inputs, we will yield garbage outputs. I am keen to hone my skills in prompt engineering and have already prepared materials to teach my students about how they can get ChatGPT to “TL;DR” and “ELI5” (literally the prompts that I use) articles from legitimate sources. I’m having more fun at work!

I was previously one of the people who was of the opinion that the hype was overblown and that people were exaggerating when they spoke of how impressive the technological improvements were. Most peoples' current exposure to what they consider "AI" is limited to a technology like chatGPT - which, while super impressive, is just one iteration of the actual underlying technology.

I have changed my mind about this. I do think that we are currently at the beginning of a massive shift that is going to impact all of our lives, on every level. I think the scale of how big this change will be, is currently beyond description because we've literally never experienced anything like it before.

GPT-4 is about to become super-charged...one thing to remember is that chatGPT isn't itself connected to the internet. There are too many developments and advancements happening every single day now when it comes to new AI stuff, that it's become impossible to remain abreast of all of it.

I'll share some of the people who I like to follow to remain somewhat in the loop when it comes to AI related content:

First and foremost I am a big fan of this guy, Matt Wolfe. His channel has really blown up in the last few weeks on YouTube and if you check out his stuff, I think you'll see why. This video from the other week is a great example - it's a condensed, but still start-to-finish style video that shows his entire process of creating his own video game, relying entirely upon AI tools to do so and having zero coding knowledge whatsoever.

What's really crazy is when you realize that the above linked video is from ~2 weeks ago, and then this one from 6 days ago is showcasing new stuff that's been released in the last few days, and it really opens up one's mind to the possibilities of what you can create with these tools.

Here's some other channels I like with AI stuff:

"MattVidPro" - yeah, dude should've used chatGPT to come up with a better name for his channel, but he has good content, lol.

AItrepreneur - as you can imagine from the channel name, this one is somewhat more focused on AI from a business perspective, but he has overall good stuff. He set up a good Discord server for his channel as well if you're into that sort of thing.

SociallyIneptWeeb interesting rabbit hole of a side project, gives you a good idea of just how far some people are pushing this technology to create some wild shit.

This dude Alek has a pretty good YouTube channel if you're interested in AI tools from a hustling/business kind of perspective as well. He's done a series where he's essentially automated a variety of side hustles that are entirely using AI and he reports back on how it's going for him.

The release of stuff like https://www.reddit.com/r/autogpt and related tools which enable GPT-4 to have internet access and the ability to more proactively perform tasks are being released and advancing on a literal hour level, it's too much happening too fast.

I think we're seeing the implosion of our current "knowledge economy", where a lot of people who basically pretend to have some kind of special ability or skillset are being displaced from their jobs. There's going to be a hell of a lot of change in the next few months/years, that's for sure.

Life is about problem-solving. Picture yourself learning assembly and the C language for the first time, and then imagine transitioning from a C programmer to working with Rust or using UI builders. The key is to continually ascend the stack and recognise that your true skill set lies in solving problems.

I also think it will create so many more jobs that it removes. There are so many business models out there that were just barely not profitable or on the verge of profitability - with higher productivity they could just make it, become a business and employ people.

I think ChatGPT will have its niche, I just don't see it as this tool for everything, i alot of the applications I see people push like writing an email or a social media post to save 3 minutes is not exactly world chanigng.

I do think certain applications like construct this sql query becuase I am too lazy to check github or stackoverflow is sort of helpful, but I would be keen to see how people would use it if its totally monetised, if its costing you a few cents to save some time then people can make the decision do i use it or do I just search myself

I think that right now this freemium subsidised version is hiding the realy cost of this and its just helping generate a lot of fluff content for tech bros, thought leaders and professional workers like myself who have bullshit tasks and jobs that would not be there under a fiat system

Not sure. I think ChatGPT allows producing 10x more bullshit 10x faster. This would mean those with cognitive capabilities will be absolutely overwhelmed.

AI prospects again bring forward the crime of fiat money. Our productivity has advanced but prices do not go down, our work hours are not reduced. This happens because while we might gain 4-5% advancement per year, INFLATION forces those profits to the top of the pyramid scheme. While we have to work for the same amount of time but at 105% with our new tools for the same 100% standard of living.

This is what the fed’s “price stability” is. It is complete and utter theft of not just your fiat savings account value- but your time, effort, and sanity. Your life.

Finally the human worker will be able to see the fruits of technological innovation and be able to have the same standard of living while working less, or earn more by maintaining their effort.

NOT ON THE FIAT STANDARD. Not without real property rights- we do not have fair property rights since our property (without Bitcoin) could be devalued at whim by a central power.

I was at a some event last week and met this guy who said that it's all lost, basically the machines will completely annihilate us. We should just wait patiently. He mentioned names, research papers, tools, etc. I think he watched too much Terminator.

Life and reality seem to be much more balanced though and while AI could indeed imply a future with dangers ahead, it could also mean possibilities and openings we can't even start to imagine.

In my opinion we have had AI in one form for a long time. The search engines. And so on. And all the AI's knowledge comes from the search engines. Its crawling the internet! In my opinion they could try and replace google with AI, make search engines illegal! Only allowed to query the almighty AI. But thats maybe only going to happen in a fictional universe :P

AI generated art and music is not going to replace anything imo. If anything it will lift the lowest budget of things, by providing them "original" art and music. Which probably wouldnt have been available to them otherwise. But the big budget stuff will still use artists. They will still pay for the real deal so to speak. So imo AI has the potential to lift projects with small budgets, it doesent threaten projects with big budgets and the artists and so on that rely on that. I dont know if that makes sense.

But also all the cheaply and instantly available AI generated art is going to spawn a counter culture, perhaps. Weppages, apps and tools that are extremely simple and text based only. But lets see.

OpenAI owns the copyright over ChatGPT's outputs. They've simply stated (in a non-binding way) they won't exercise that privilege — although one wonders what would happen if someone created a Harry Potter-esque bestseller that includes ideas spawned in a ChatGPT suggestion.

Dumb companies are jumping on the bandwagon. Smart companies are avoiding it, for the obvious IP, confidentiality, and security issues.

As usual, try to work with smart people and avoid dumb people, who have a bad habit of dragging everyone down with them when they err.

Short term? Well, we are living thru it - not much. Some people don’t pay much attention past “I read in this article that these AIs have bias because white cis-men wrote the code and that’s bad” and others think it’s skynet but most don’t pay close attention and will likely miss it until something huge happens. I’m in the minority where I use it every single day and feel frustrated that I can’t keep up with all the news coming out of people/corporations using it in cool, new ways.

Long term - we can’t even imagine… who would have understood how their life would change after the Industrial Revolution? Human life itself changed - and I think this change will be faster. We can likely have humanoid robots in businesses and homes in my lifetime that have a “personality” and engage in conversation! This is unbelievable!

I am not worried about jobs. I am worried more about the level of intelligence of the people using chatGPT and all that CRAP. Soon we will be literally living like in Idiocracy (documentary). So.. FUCK CHAT GPT, FUCK AI.

Robots must do only one thing: hard physical labor that is hard for humans to do it. Let the human brain work as it was designed.

Most companies have frameworks, processes and rules to make sure their production output is consistent. This happens not only in manufacturing, but in all productive sectors. Once you have all your processes mapped, you can automate parts of it, reducing the workforce and saving money. With AI this automatization of industries will be faster, just it. That said, in the very near future (less than 2 years) knowing AI will not be a nice plus on resumés, but a must have. Interacting with AI (generative AI) is something that will be essential to any industry and top company.

However, talent can't be replaced with AI. The best people of anything will always be valuable, no matter how automated or buzz-wordy the market becomes.

LLMs are not AIs in a way an average person thinks, LLMs are really dumb, actually. The problem is they achieve spectacular results and this may lead to some companies that develop critical system to decide that those results are good enough for them.

An LLM may have a similar or even lower error rate than humans at the job but the issue here is that when a human makes mistake we review and update procedures so we never ever stumble upon the same problem. When an LLM hallucinates good luck finding the actual reason to that.

With human-run systems we are on a very slow but steady path of quality progress. With LLM-run systems we may even have a big jump at first and a very predictable error rate but one that really never goes down.

AIs like ChatGPT are extremely expensive toys. OpenAI receives hundreds of millions of dollars in donations every year. Yet, the GPT family of AIs are only useful for generating text that is of dubious utility/accuracy. This is especially obvious when generating code, because it always requires a programmer to fix it. At best ChatGPT can cut down on the time to generate text, but a human will have to clean it up.

But ChatGPT can't do anything else. It can't prepare your taxes (it doesn't have uptodate tax codes). It can't diagnose what disease you have (it can't look at you and see your symptoms). It can't plan a delivery route. All ChatGPT does is randomly generate text that resembles text seen on the internet. To a lot of people, ChatpGPT looks like magic -- often it's inexplicably funny. But it is only a glorified chatbot. As such, ChatGPT (aka GPT-4), like it's predecessors GPT-1 through 3, is a technological dead-end -- a flash in the pan that will be replaced by another flash in the pan called GPT-5.

But there are other forms of AI that are not toys -- there are AIs that are very useful:

Ai is coming for everyone’s job

It will completely replace human bullshitters because bullshit is what it does best..

I think it will make thing easier, but that will always have it's troubles and we will take for granted the advances made, but that is just human nature.

Two thing to think about:

What if the chat algorithm is biased? You ask it something and it return only the "politically correct" answers of the who is in charge now. This would bring a possibility of hyper manipulation of public opinion "Chat GPT said that so it must be true..."

Chat GPT analyze and train itself with all that people write and probably with voice recognitions sample that found on the internet. Is content it is not original but merely computations of all the things it saw on the internet. If the majority of people use it from where it will get original human content to learn about? After sometimes there would be only fake shuffled content out there.

Just my two cents, and of course the possibility to to good things are also unlimited but so are the possibility of very bad things happening if not properly programmed. Seeing what happened from 2020 onward i do not think we are in for a good ride.

I think this will be a massive step forward that will be required when trying to connect the mind with a computer properly

Rather than catastrophizing on AI destroying jobs, I believe that it is reasonable to look at the integration of AI like that of any other technological innovation in history. Consider when we switched to more efficient modes of transportation, energy, or communication. Workers that were employed in the "old" way of doing things were displaced, but there there were always new opportunities downstream of the technological innovations. As long as the automation brought out by AI aids in more efficiently meeting the needs of consumers (and gov't intervention through overregulation is at least kept to a minimal), I don't see why this time it would be any different.

Competition has always made as better

It will makes jobs fast and productive so it will be best to start using them now.

I would not worry. Instead, I'd start emphesizing engineering and programming skills at schools to be able to do the new jobs created in the new age of AI. This is lacking in schools for younger kids.