It’s been great having company in our little house. About half the time I’m here, I’m alone, and while that time is enjoyable the conversations get a little stale. I tend to agree with myself.
But with friends here in the mornings and evenings, we can talk about people, politics, religion, literature, sports…all the things I love debating. These two friends see the world mostly as I do, so it’s not contentious, but it’s still fun to share the experiences and opinions. With our somewhat isolated home in Fallbrook and a small set of friends/family in Louisville, those discussions have been rare.
The other topic I’ve spent time on this morning while we wait to set out for Yum Center is ChatGPT. The more I learn about it, I’m convinced of two things:
- It’s not an AI with free will and consciousness. It might become a building block for such a thing, but it’s not there yet. Not even close.
- Having said that, it will change the business world, and quickly. It’s an extremely powerful knowledge tool, on the same level as spreadsheets, word processors and computer simulations. It’s a new way of interacting with complex back end systems and knowledge bases, and in a few years every person in corporate America will need to become comfortable with ChatGPT4 and successors. ChatGPT can and will build websites, write technical and marketing documentation, produce complex graphs and reports, write software, and do basic research. Many, many entry level jobs will be replaced.
Almost all the things that the Star Trek cast did while interacting with their fake starship computer are now possible. You can use plain English to tell the computer to do complex things on your behalf, and have it answer almost any question. So now we’ve got the communicator (mobile phones) and the omnipresent talking computer. I hope I’m around for warp drive and the transporter.
Fortunately, we humans will still get to play sports and do manual labor jobs. Jesse is on the right track.
