Photo de Saad Chaudhry sur Unsplash
There’s a crack up line in the movie How to lose a guy in 10 days where Andie, a writer for a fashion magazine has a conversation with her editor Lana :
Lana: Congratulations. This shows me you’re ready to be unleashed. From now on, feel free to write about anything.
https://www.ranker.com/list/how-to-lose-a-guy-in-10-days-quotes/movie-and-tv-quotes
Andie: Anything?
Lana: Wherever the wind blows you.
Andie: Even politics?
Lana: Well, the wind’s not going to blow you there.
Andie: What about religion, poverty, economics?
Lana: This wind is really more of a light breeze.
The hubster and I often use this line jokingly on each other because it’s so true. We invite people to feel free to do whatever they want but in reality there are limits to what we’ll allow.
I had an interesting conversation at work a couple of weeks ago. ChatGPT the AI programme that is sweeping the internet was the hot topic of the day. I had seen it advertised on social media targeting students writing dissertations and essays.
If you haven’t come across it before ChatGPT is an online tool which uses artificial intelligence to formulate the answer to just about anything you could ask it and to learn from your responses to it so that it gives more and more precise answers as you go along. For example, it can write your literature essay for you complete with quotes, real life examples taken from across the internet. Or it can put together a computer programme for you or a fitness programme that is worthy of a highly qualified fitness instructor.
At Uni 30 years ago we studied basic natural language processing, or teaching computers to formulate grammatically correct and socially appropriate responses. ChatGPT is that, but on steroids. As one of the guys in office said, it is as big of leap in AI evolution and revolution as the creation of the internet.
Clearly the obvious downside is that it will do away with a number of jobs.
Who needs computer developers if people can simply pop in your needs and AI writes your programme for you?
Would you pay for a fitness expert when you can get a tailored programme online?
Why would you go to church to hear a sermon when you can type in what you want to hear into a programme and it writes a perfectly formulated theologically sound message for you that avoids everything you don’t want to hear? Ahem.
As the AI is learning, who is harvesting the information?
Will machines take over the world and oppress us?
Are we continually being manipulated by subtle marketing?
Are our phones listening to us and targeting us with ads online using the conversations we have while they are sitting innocently beside us on the table?
As we talked over the implications together of what this development might mean for the future it became clear that in the wake of all the global changes that covid, expansionist policies, wars, earthquakes, political reform and the rising cost of living has brought, this one is going to provide an existential crisis for hundreds of thousands of people.
And yet.
And yet, as we talked, the thought came to me that this could actually be an opportunity for us to use our collective imaginations and could be something that we use to leap off of to do something that nobody has ever dreamed of. Used correctly as a tool, AI could free our time to do other things if we could just imagine what doesn’t yet exist.
Before cars were invented, nobody knew what a mechanic was or a panel beater. When cottage industries were replaced by factories, nobody imagined one day there would be research and development teams, or robot manufacturers.
This leap in AI evolution is not a new leap that we haven’t done before, it’s just an exceptionally big leap and people, as they always have been, are anxious that they will be replaced and not find their place in the world.
Honestly, I am excited. This is a huge opportunity for collective imagination to get to work and for calling things into existance that do not yet exist.
I wish in my conversation I could have said what I was really thinking but couldn’t say because the incomprehension was already too great.
I wish I could have said that God gives creativity, wisdom, imagination to people if we ask him, that he has a hope and a future for humanity and it is a good one, that he is our secure place from which we launch ourselves into a world wobbling from uncertainty, that he is our rock when we feel like everything is crumbling around us.
I wish I could have told them about his incredible goodness that makes us courageous and brave to face the future because he holds us securely in his hands and he protects us.
I wish I could have said that the winds of change bring new life, that they spread seed across the land into places we never thought life would come.
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