OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has brought the progress made in the Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) space to the consumer. My level of knowledge surrounding A.I. is that of a curious technologist.

It is hard to overstate just how impactful I think advances in A.I. will be on humanity. Our “super power” is our ability to think creatively. This, in a sense, is limited only by the amount of labor one can put towards exploring and experimenting with different thoughts. The use of A.I for this labor will completely revolutionize the way we think about work and productivity. I envision a future where humanities greatest minds are able to experiment and re-experiment in a manner that is so exponential to what we understand today that we cannot begin to fathom the impact. It brings to mind my simplified understanding of Moore’s Law which, to my understanding, posits that the strength of computer chips is increasing exponentially when compared to their size. (Admittedly, the wikipedia article on the subject is more advanced than my current understanding). If the rate at which we experiment can increase exponentially our discoveries should also increase exponentially.

Is A.I. coming for our jobs?

I think about my career in program management and am confident that one day, in the not too distant future, most of what I do will be done by artificial intelligence. An oversimplified explanation of my current role is I take inputs from stakeholders, distill the inputs into technical requirements, and work with engineers to plan and prioritize work that meets requirements. It’s my job to ensure the work being executed by engineers is aligned with organization priorities, to remove any blockers to this work, and to ensure that our stakeholders understand the current state of Workforce Identity and Access Management (IAM). It’s likely that one day artificial intelligence will be able to automatically pull those inputs from organizational correspondence (meetings, emails, slack, etc.), market conditions, and industry standards. I anticipate that the artificial intelligence will be able to establish a prioritized plan for engineers to execute against. The skilled worker and even “knowledge workers” will ultimately be replaced with A.I. who will be less prone to mistakes and ultimately more efficient.

This sounds like it could be a dystopia of “The Robots are coming for our jobs”. but I don’t think it has to be. Imagine if you could free yourself from actually having to know how to do something before being able to experiment with an idea. I think that’s where we’re headed. You have a book idea but aren’t an eloquent writer? Guess what? The A.I. can help you with that. You have an idea for an app but don’t know how to code? Guess what? The A.I. can help you with that. You want to analyze a large data set but lack experience in data analysis? The A.I. can help you with that. You want to build a company logo but have never done graphic design? The A.I. can help you with that. Here are the use cases, for which I have successfully used ChatGPT.

1. Copy editing: I brainstorm and draft and redraft my blog posts weekly. Once I feel as though the content is robust enough/worthwhile I ask ChatGPT to provide me recommendations.
2. Planning: This year I knew I wanted to blog, pick up a new hobby, read 12 books, and get to know Charleston. I was able to use ChatGPT to build out a reading list that aligned with my interests, I then used ChatGPT to identify places in the Charleston area for me to practice photography. After I had a reading list and photography schedule I asked ChatGPT to suggest blog posting that aligned with the list and schedule. Some of the prompts I’ve used some while others I’ve skipped over. I think the real benefit here was I was able to use ChatGPT as a sounding board to refine my plan and generate ideas.
3. Coding: I used ChatGPT to build out code that will allow me to set a workout objective in terms of X Number of Workouts of Y duration or more a week and then retroactively analyzes my Apple Health data to show how many times I met the objective Z times .
4. Logo Development: I used DALL-E (through ChatGPT) to develop the logo on this site.
5. Troubleshooting: When I decided to ‘re-launch’ my blog this year I decided I wanted to change domain names. While attempting to follow a guide I completely biffed my wordpress deployment. Using ChatGPT I was able to track down the various conf file that I had to validate settings on. I then used ChatGPT to review each conf file until I found the one that was causing the issue (redirect loop).

I imagine that experts in this space would look at the above use cases and think “that doesn’t even scratch the surface”. The various uses I’ve found for it in my myopic world I think can be extrapolated to most of the challenges that we, as a species, face.

Now is the time to learn

At this point in time I, like a lot of people, am just starting to grapple with the massive implications of the recent advances in technology. I plan on reading Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark throughout the month of February and hope to be informed enough to have an opinion on the below questions.

1. What problems am I most excited about A.I. helping the collective “us” with?
2. What is the Effective Altruism (EA) movement?
3. What are my “reach” predictions for AI and where we’re headed?

A.I. is still very much in an imperfect state and is “halluncinating” in bigs way. But that’s when a technology is the most fun. When it is new, exciting, and open to speculation in terms of applications.