Will ChatGPT eat my job? Will cities burn? Will robot overlords rise from the ashes?

In Febrary of 2023, friends and family asked me for my perspective on AI after the buzz on ChatGPT devoured the news. I’ve gathered some of it here, likely to change before the year is half over. Take what’s useful to you, ignore the rest.

Quick answers: Yes, but you’ll get a different job. No, we will grind on in our rat cage cities. Maybe, but the robots won’t be ready in your lifetime.

I’ve worked in tech for 15 years, recently at a YC funded ML analytics startup that was doing some interesting modeling on the fly. I’m not an expert, but I have some knowledge. (Also, nobody is an expert yet on the impact. It's too new. But it's also fun try and predict the prediction machine.)

• ChatGPT is a surprisingly capable autocomplete tool, that can autocomplete a lengthy coherent essay. It is not artificial intelligence. It’s a mirror of our prior written thought, and we’ve written about so much fascinating stuff! As humans, not simpler animals, we should recognize ourselves in the mirror.
• The machines learn from the past. As we write more with machines, nonsense mistakes will slip through. Machines will learn false things and its reflection of us will gradually get fuzzy, out of focus. We’ll make fixes, but new types of mistakes will continually emerge.
• ChatGPT has created buzz because everyone can try it and experience its capabilities. But, it is just one of many new tools already shaping all aspects of business and government. These tools make observations about our collective words and activity, to streamline decisions and jobs. They work at a scale and speed that’s profound compared to what people can do. The impact is already far greater but more invisible than the front-page news.
• Tools are agnostic. But they are built and leveraged by companies that are mandated by law to prioritize profit over everything else. In a world imbued with classism and racism, even good intentions will reflect and reinforce past inequity.
• Instances of change like this moment with ChatGPT might feel fast and surprising, but this is just the next wave of evolution caused by new tools, following computers, television, factories, printing press, and fire for making tools.
• There will gradually be fewer jobs for writers and coders, but more jobs for editors and designers. There will be more content, more apps and gadgets, but the quality of these things will continue to oscillate, just as it has for the past century, between too-good-to-be-true and frustratingly cheap and flimsy.
• Occasionally, something unexpected will completely implode, and the status quo will be shaken. For example, one day everything with velcro might become completely unavailable. 5 days later, the blip will be a tired meme and then forgotten. The machines will make a mind-boggling mistake, but the machines that watch the machines will fix it, learn, and get better.
• Occasionally, someone will exploit our dependency on these tools, because despite humanity’s collective wealth and strength, we continue to distrust others and hoard everything. We are fragile animals without our tools, but when we are hurt, we band together to build more laws and tools to lock us down and shield us from ourselves, perpetuating distrust.
• People adapt and adapt again. We sometimes mistake inertia for inevitable. That’s what we’ve done and what we’ll do.