ChatGPT: The 5th Industrial Revolution is Not Just a Phase

This moment in history will be remembered like the first cell phone: a giant irrevocable step in humankind’s daily life towards reliance on technology. ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is a language generation model that is taking over public conversation. Its ability to generate human-like text based on input has opened up a plethora of new applications, possibilities, and anxieties (sometimes ranging on the existential). With hundreds of millions of visits in just two months since its inception, ChatGPT is quickly on course to become a staple in many professions and industries, from customer service to coding to content creation. While ChatGPT may not take your job just yet, AI will be disrupting your workplace soon and it is better to be ahead of that curve than behind it. At each stage of the industrial revolution society scrambled to come to terms with the implications of its new innovations, ChatGPT is just the beginning of the AI revolution but it’s already the fastest spreading tech in history.

There has been a great deal of focus on the current limitations of the technology. People complaining that it’s bad at math, that it makes things up, that it doesn’t cite sources. To them I say, “Let’s revisit this in one year”. Just a few days ago as of this writing there was an update to the math module and the factuality of the site. In the coming weeks and months we will see massive players enter the fray who will likely blow this current ChatGPT out of the water. Two days from now Google is making an announcement about its pivot to release a more powerful competitor, which will likely be Sparrow, the weakest of its three powerful and proprietary transformer based large language models. (Oh wait, I’m not kidding, as I’m typing this they announced “Bard”) Microsoft had a leak showing that it will be integrating the still unreleased GPT-4 into its Bing search engine very soon. We are just at the beginning, to look at our feet now and say we are standing on firm ground as humans with an authoritative grasp on math word problems, fact checking, source citing, and even writing style is to ignore the accelerating rate of change. 

As with any new technology, the widespread adoption of ChatGPT raises important ethical questions and considerations. There are concerns about the potential for AI to replace human workers, particularly in industries where ChatGPT can generate human-like text. This raises the question of how to ensure that workers are protected and their livelihoods are not threatened. It is not that ChatGPT can do many human jobs on its own but rather that a human being operating it efficiently has the productive capacity greater than an employee without it. For example, a job that once required 10 web developers might now require 5. Many MSM pundits are saying that in previous industrial revolutions the new technological innovation just led to the creation of jobs we couldn’t imagine at the time. I, for one, disagree. AI overtaking a fundamentally human aspect of labor, writing itself, does not create jobs but merely funnels agency and productivity to increasingly small proportions of society who are leveraging it.

In a search for a point of reference for this disruptive technology, some have drawn comparison to the ill-fated enthusiasm (read: bubble) surrounding NFT technology. NFTs took several years to find and achieve adoption use cases such as collectibles, art, and music. Even today these use cases aren’t mainstream. NFTs and chatGPT are hardly similar beyond involving technological innovation and generating hype. NFTs are focused on ownership and scarcity in the digital space, while ChatGPT is focused on generating human-like text using advanced AI. They are different in their fundamental nature and should not be considered as similar trends or fads. 

To highlight the contrast in their adoption and scale, let's compare their numbers and timelines. There are approximately 240 million NFT owners in the world as of today, and NFTs were invented in May 2014, so 109 months of time to spread. In contrast, chatGPT has had over 590 million visits from over 100 million unique users in January 2023, just 2 months since release. Yes, there are some auctions at Christies, some NBA highlights, and some high profile tweets for sale, but NFT technology does not touch the every day life of the average worker- this is where ChatGPT and its subsequent innovations will differ. 

We have all watched our friends become “professional pundits" on Epidemiology and International Affairs over the last few years of global chaos and the next flavor of the intellectual times appears to be Artificial Intelligence. This is for good reason— interaction with AI is about to become integral to many jobs currently untouched by the field. Siri and Alexa are child’s toys compared to ChatGPT which will be a child’s toy compared to its future iterations and the competition’s in the coming months and years. In short, things are accelerating and it’s worth taking account of where they might be going before it’s too late to change course. Welcome to the 5th Industrial Revolution.