With the recent developments in AI, you may be feeling a little obsolete. Chat-GPT, OpenAI’s latest chatbot, can do a lot of things we once thought of as uniquely human: write college essays, generate programming code, and compose poems. While some skills remain uniquely ours (writing novels, full-stack coding, flying planes), it seems reasonable to assume that they won’t remain so for long. The implications are unsettling—when nothing remains that we’re uniquely good at, then what good are humans? Are we about to be surpassed?
We humans with our brains are the most complex thing in the known universe. That in itself is awe inspiring. And I am with you on post-ideological, but agnostic on transhumanism and probably less skeptical than you on AI. But there are impressive individuals who claim that we are at a time similar to 1440, when the printing press was invented, because of AI. Do you disagree?
I like your writing, Arielle, but you neglect to mention the superiority of human juggling abilities - dont want to be a dick here, but these robots got a ways to go...
One thing I think ChatGPT is really good at is depth. There's this concept called the illusion of explanatory depth that basically says we think we know more than we actually do. For example, trying to explain how toilet works or what houses are - we can explain it on the surface level, but very few people actually know all of the stuff that makes up the things we use everyday. https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/the-illusion-of-explanatory-depth
Part of the reason for this is the human memory is about 1gb (I read this somewhere a long time ago and can't find a link). Though we might process a lot more information every second, human recall is very blurry. This where I think GPT-4 wins in a big way. It always has access to the "memory" of all the things it references and conversations it's had with all the millions of users using it.
We humans with our brains are the most complex thing in the known universe. That in itself is awe inspiring. And I am with you on post-ideological, but agnostic on transhumanism and probably less skeptical than you on AI. But there are impressive individuals who claim that we are at a time similar to 1440, when the printing press was invented, because of AI. Do you disagree?
I like your writing, Arielle, but you neglect to mention the superiority of human juggling abilities - dont want to be a dick here, but these robots got a ways to go...
Robot ¨juggling¨: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLrz_R_T6kg
Human juggling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP30u5kQznw
Alex Barron can juggle 14 balls. Fuck the Turing Test. It´s the Barron test now. Anyone that feels threatened by Chat GPT needs to get out more.
Interesting analysis. Go humans!
One thing I think ChatGPT is really good at is depth. There's this concept called the illusion of explanatory depth that basically says we think we know more than we actually do. For example, trying to explain how toilet works or what houses are - we can explain it on the surface level, but very few people actually know all of the stuff that makes up the things we use everyday. https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/the-illusion-of-explanatory-depth
Part of the reason for this is the human memory is about 1gb (I read this somewhere a long time ago and can't find a link). Though we might process a lot more information every second, human recall is very blurry. This where I think GPT-4 wins in a big way. It always has access to the "memory" of all the things it references and conversations it's had with all the millions of users using it.
brilliant and clear I have been waiting for this
Thank You!