In an age of technological innovation, we have more opportunities than ever before. But in this article, I want to share my thoughts on how irrelevance might be your biggest worry…
Are we being ignorant of what might happen?
I have a huge problem. I think too much… If I go about my day and come across an article, video, podcast, book, or whatever else have you – my brain has a tendency to view whatever information I have learned from all possible angles. I am constantly looking for the meaning of things, and that is not always a good thing.
I have been studying and researching Artificial Intelligence very on and off for a few years, but it wasn’t until November 2022 that I REALLY started to pay attention. The release of mankind’s biggest innovation within technology – ChatGPT.
This tool could do anything. Ask it anything you could possibly think of, and it would provide you with a thorough answer that would leave you breathless. Like, “What is the meaning of life?” or “I have a cough, what could be the issue?”.
You see, the program – and I stress “PROGRAM” – will take whatever you put in, and give you whatever it can based on what it knows. It knows a great number of things, (actually, most things, since the beginning of the internet up until 2021) but it pays off to be clear in the way one communicates with it.
The community of enthusiasts around the world came up with a great line for this; “Garbage In, Garbage Out”. If you feed it crap, you’ll receive crap in return. Simple, right? Well, only to the extent the user is able to be creative in what to ask. And that’s where things start to get interesting…
What do I want to create today?
If you know what you want to ask, you could say something like
“You are an expert programmer and user interface professional. Write a program in Javascript that will do X when the website visitor does Y, and make it look like Z.”
To my shock, when I started to be specific about what I wanted from it, it created code that I could put directly onto my website, specifically designed for my specific desires. Now, that might be cool in itself, but this is just the very beginning… And I am starting to think that there might not be an end as long as we have the capacity to be creative…
I saw a TED talk about OpenAI’s development and progress on ChatGPT and I was shocked. When the presenter asked what type of meal would go well after a TED conference, ChatGPT gave it an image of a set table, all created on the spot, with the ingredients and recipe to create that meal alongside a shopping list that was ready to go with the click of a button. It even shared it on Twitter! All from one question and a few clicks of a button.
Now, that might not seem like a huge “wow” moment for many, but think about this; Whatever your mind can conceive, the program will eventually be able to achieve. People have already used it to ace their school exams, automate 80% of their workload so that they could take on another job, created businesses based on AI-generated images and Print On Demand service providers, and created music, voices, faces, phonecalls to actual humans, HR, support, and the list goes on forever.
So, why irrelevance?
There are many reasons why we should fear the outcome of global irrelevance for normal people. When a human has nothing to do during their everyday life, they’ll likely become depressed. There’s no fulfillment or growth anymore.
Let’s just take doctors as an example.
Doctors are more or less glorified information managers in our day and age. They will review a disease or any health problem, then look at the available information to deal with this problem based on their experience, then consult with the patient on how to cure or manage the issue.
If there were 1 million doctors in total, and one of them had a major breakthrough in their field, the news of this breakthrough would take a long time to get around to all the doctors. There’s also the whole arrogant perspective to take into account; some doctors have not done anything else for their entire life, so implementing new ideas might not be as easy to do, as it could very well make them feel like they have been doing things “wrong” up until then.
But what if there were 1 million AI doctors instead?
Well, if a new, more efficient solution came to be, sharing the information would require nothing more than a network update. In an instant, all the doctors would be as efficient and masterful as they could be. Of course, there’s always the risk of corrupted code or any other events that could happen that would make this a potential disaster, but I hope you see my point. “Information Managers” like bankers, doctors, lawyers, and a whole bunch of other titles and jobs would be useless overnight.
So, what happens if what you’ve done your entire life all of a sudden is not an option? Well, one could get a different education. Let’s say we go to school for 3 more years to become something different because what we’ve done so far has vanished into the air of innovation.
When you graduate, let’s say as a 3D artist, technology would probably have made your skills obsolete already.
What then? Do you go back to school again? Who will pay for it? How do you think your mental health would end up if your life becomes an endless loop of re-schooling?
The Rise of a New Era
If we can’t keep up with our own creativity, we have to get ahead of it. I believe that today – more important than ever before – we need new kinds of schools. We need to go away from the archaic systems we’ve been shackled by for thousands of years and focus more on the human individual instead of the job it’s supposed to carry out.
We need to become aware of what we are, what we’re capable of, what we can create, what we love, and how to come together to create a better future. The race is on, and most of us are patiently sitting in front of our TV awaiting the next piece of fabricated news…
This technology has already shaped the very planet we’re on, and we are the ones who need to make good decisions for those who are going to live in the future we’re creating right now.
Pretty soon, DEATH will get a completely new perspective. (more on that in a later article)
I believe that it’s everyone’s duty to at least look at what this is going to do. To look at this new technology from a perspective of “How can I use this for good”, instead of “This is dangerous” or “I don’t understand this, so I won’t bother”.
I will be writing a lot more on this topic, and I will educate as many as I can on how they can use the resources we have available today in a way that will remove the shackles we have been trapped by for so many generations. It’s time for us to take responsibility and share what value we can for those who will come after us.
Conclusion
I don’t know why I always go into a rant when it comes to these topics, but I think it’s because it’s so important. The way our kids have been handed this technology and with the way the world is today, we can’t sit idly by and wait for better days. We have to actively create them, or become irrelevant with no purpose in a world with more possibilities than ever before in human history.
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