How sad should I be about ChatGPT? | Robert Heaton
How sad should I be about ChatGPT?
14 Dec 2022
A week ago my brother sent a message to our family group:
“My team at work launched something! It’s called ChatGPT. Give it a go: https://chat.openai.com”
I talked to ChatGPT for ten minutes and then had a crisis of meaning for a few days. I eventually texted my brother back to say well done, because family will still be important, whatever happens next.
"confused calvin and a robot in the style of calvin and hobbes"<br>- Stable Diffusion
At first I thought this was the end of the world. ChatGPT is nowhere near an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI): an AI capable of performing most tasks that a human can. But until last week I thought that even ChatGPT’s level of abstract reasoning was impossible. It can already - to an extent - code, rhyme, correct, advise, and tell stories. How fast is it going to improve? When’s it going to stop? I know that GPT is just a pile of floating point numbers predicting the next token in an output sequence, but perhaps that’s all you need in order to be human enough. I suddenly thought that AGI was inevitable, and I’d never given this possibility much credit before. I found that it made me very unhappy. This is a post about feelings, not analysis.
I texted everyone I could to warn them what was coming. I sounded like an uncritical AI futurist. But all the real futurists seemed excited, or at least frantic. I just felt glum. Our parents had got both the property boom and the last shreds of meaning.
I cycled to a friend’s house to watch England play in the World Cup. I thought of Richard Feynman and how he felt after the Manhattan Project. He said that he saw people building a bridge in New York and thought that they were being absurd, that they didn’t understand. There were atomic bombs now, it was senseless to make anything. It would all be destroyed soon.
As I pedalled I watched people through their office windows, composing unclear emails and editing buggy spreadsheets. I hadn’t played any part in GPT, but I felt like Feynman. Why were these people wasting their time? Didn’t they read the news? Human striving was over, this was all going to be annihilated. Just go home and wait.
This was an overreaction. ChatGPT is impressive, but it’s not an AGI or even proof that AGI is possible. It makes more accessible some skills that I’ve worked hard to cultivate, such as writing clear sentences and decent programs. This is somewhat good for the world and probably somewhat bad for me, to the first degree. But I can still write and code better than GPT.
On the other hand, whilst I can peacefully coexist with GPT as it currently stands, it won’t be standing there for long. Perhaps I should calm down; disruption is everywhere and necessary. Artists should be afraid of Stable Diffusion; master weavers are anxious about mechanised looms. But now machines are encroaching on things I care about and everyone needs to pay attention.
Even if AGI isn’t imminent, I suspect that big ideas will become more important and their implementation will become more automated. But I don’t have big ideas. If I did then I’d be the kind of person who sees AI as an opportunity, not a threat. Recently there’s been a lot of VC money sloshing around Silicon Valley and not enough programmers. This has made it possible for the programmers who are there to do well in cash and cachet just by being competent implementers. We can even get another rung or two higher by lightly exaggerating the impact of our work during performance reviews. This has allowed me to have a type of success without much brilliance.
It’s been a good deal, but it’s made me professionally complacent. Today’s system works for me, why would it ever change? I assumed there could never be another tech crash. I found AI think-pieces boring and didn’t have time or expertise for the maths. I ignored the boosters, the blowhards, and apparently the experts. Now I’d guess that AI is going to change everything, somehow or another. Luckily I’m allowed to be complacent. I don’t have to be right about the future; I’m not responsible for a company or a product that needed to see this coming. I’ve probably been fortunate enough in the old world that I’m more worried about what AI means for my chances of self-actualisation than for my stability.
I think that AI will make programmers - and almost all other workers - much more productive, but what this means for the industry will depend on the size of the productivity gains. A 50% increase in output per programmer would be incredible (and perhaps even a wild overestimate), but I think it could be absorbed by something that looks like the current tech market. A 500% increase couldn’t.
Some grunt work will get eaten by AI, probably at first as an augmentation to human programmers. What counts as grunt work will depend on how much GPT’s code runs in production. I don’t know where the people currently doing...