ChatGPT Retrospective
December 9, 2023
Today is the 1 year anniversary of me trying out ChatGPT.
So at 41 years old I’m the very narrow generation that started childhood without the internet but entered adulthood with it freely available. And I was an early adopter. I was probably the only 12 year old within 30 miles of my house to have daily conversations with people around the country over the internet. And I’m pretty confident in that statement because...you know...I knew every 12 year old within 30 miles of my house. I’m also pretty sure I’m in rare company as a 12 year old to run up a $300 long distance bill because connecting to the internet was a long distance phone call to Nashville. And remember this was $300 of 1995 money! Still thankful Dad paid that and didn’t throw my computer in the trash.
Flash forward a couple years and the internet was ubiquitous. Geocities, Angelfire, AOL Instant Messenger, Livejournal, MySpace, Facebook, etc. Someone who is 35 years old most likely had the internet at their fingertips in most of their memories, and someone who is 30 cannot really conceive of not having the internet. Someone who is 20 may very well spend more of their time in the internet than they do time in meat-space. In my opinion the internet fundamentally changed our civilization in ways we’ll still be talking about hundreds of years from now. Historians and sociologists will point to somewhere around 1995 and say “There! That’s when it changed!”
It’s more a good thing than a bad thing in my opinion but...my point is that it’s a thing. It’s a big-fucking-deal-thing.
I absolutely adore information and learning and curiosity. I will spend absurd amounts of time reading about random shit or arguing with phantoms on the internet because it satisfies my curiosity. Partly, also, this is a defense mechanism. There’s a quote from one of my favorite series that captures my brain really well: “A moving mind is always fed. At rest, mine eats itself.” And the internet is the thing that’s always there to keep feeding my mind. I legitimately question what my life looks like if I hadn’t gotten the internet when I did because it gave my mind a place to go to and keep moving. Anyways, this is way outside the scope of my point.
My point is that the internet fundamentally changed civilization. Like Yuval Noah Harari’s Cognitive Revolution 70,000 years ago, or the Agricultural Revolution 10,000 years ago, or the Scientific Revolution 500 years ago...I think my generation lived through the “Information Revolution” or the “Connection Revolution” or whatever you want to call it. Suddenly people around the world could form societies, could find like-minded individuals, could learn about anything at all. And there’s lots of darkness there and lots of lies and truth becomes even more difficult to find because now everything gets some space and oxygen in the world’s mind. Conspiracy theories. Flat-earthers. Antivax silliness. Trump won. Palestinian genocide. Whatever. Lots of made-up fantasies that become group fantasies. But there is also connections and learning things you would have never learned even 50 years ago. Sharing of information around the world. It’s civilization-shaking change and that is neither good or bad. It’s just change. But it’s change that has impacted all of us and will continue to do so.
One year in...I see ChatGPT as being one of the most fundamentally important parts of the internet. I use it literally every day at this point and I strongly encourage everyone to be exploring it themselves. It took all of the information in the internet and it made it much more accessible. And, sure, it’s going to lie to you sometimes. I got news for you - the internet’s been lying since its inception too. That doesn’t invalidate it, that just means you need to be critical about your information consumption. Guess what...you should be critical about your information consumption anyways - whether that’s something you found on Google, something you heard from the news, or something you heard from Billy-Bob next door. Bad information is part of the human condition and ChatGPT just makes it blindingly simple to get that same information.
So my question is not “is ChatGPT a civilization shaking thing” because, yeah, it is simply because it’s a faster avenue to get information from the internet. What it is right now is enough to warrant that definition, let alone what it’s going to become over the rest of kid’s childhood. What I waffle on is if it will be as stark a point in time as the internet coming on the scene. Is this part of the “Information Revolution” or is this yet another revolution? Are we seeing the birth of the “Intelligence Revolution” now? I wish I knew! It will be interesting to read this again in the coming years and reevaluate that question.
For myself, right now in 2023, I don’t see this as another revolution yet. I see ChatGPT as nothing more than another flavor of narrow/specialized Artificial Intelligence. It’s a specialized AI that makes it vastly more easy to access the world’s mind that we’ve created on the internet. But...it’s still a human world. The knowledge in the world’s mind, the knowledge on the internet, is still just coming from us. From humans. With all our flaws and lies and stupidity and all our brilliance. So it’s vastly smarter than me but it doesn’t replace my creativity. It hasn’t done anything novel. It cannot replace me as a human. All it is at this point is a glorified shovel. But make no mistake...two years ago I was digging in the dirt of the internet with my bare hands and I cannot put into words how much better it is to have a shovel.
Now...this will become another revolution if we reach Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). When we reach AGI it will be true creation. It will be discovering fire all over again. At that point ChatGPT won’t just be a faster avenue to the world’s mind that humanity created on the internet. At that point it will UNDERSTAND the entirety of that world’s mind and it will start thinking for itself. Understand...at that point we aren’t the smartest thing on the planet anymore. Not even close. One moment humanity will be ascendant and the next we...won’t be.
Anyways, that’s where I’m at one year in. ChatGPT is the coolest fucking tool I’ve ever been handed but it just eased access to something I already had - the sum of human knowledge in the world on the internet - and it is going to continue to alter humanity along with the internet. Someday it may very well become it’s own entity and get a mind of it’s own. On that day it will be an entirely different thing and an entirely different world. Everyone should understand the difference between what it is and what it might become someday.
And, of course, everyone should hail our AI Overlords when they appear.
