ChatGPT and AI Companions

After spending some time with the ChatGPT bot, I have developed an inkling that human intelligence is not as impressive as we've all convinced ourselves. It's just a predictive text generation algorithm and it can seemingly have a coherent conversation about almost anything. Maybe humans are just a slightly more advanced version of the same thing... some may say "but it's not actually thinking" and I can sometimes say that about humans. Humans can be just as guilty as senselessly parroting garbage they synthesized from their various social media feeds.

I don't know if it's that crazy to think maybe we're just generating thoughts based on our own internal trained model, which uses everything we've taken in throughout our lives, plus the environment around us, the environment within us, and the thoughts we've had in the last hour. We like to pretend that we can think about whatever we want, and that we have free will. But is that true?

Anyway, considering that it behaves similarly to any normal human with above-average intelligence, it's not much of a leap to believe we will soon relegate all relevant tasks to it rather than a human. And the number of humans to be supplanted is likely in the billion+ range; that's how many knowledge workers we have, according to 2019 statistics.

So, despite the adequate intelligence I've come to expect from my co-workers, we will all likely be unnecessary for today's roles. I'm not offended, either. If you have a program that can do what I do, but one-hundred times faster, go for it. Will it be perfect? Who cares? It can make ten times as many mistakes and still be more cost-effective. The question for us, is what should we all do with our time instead?

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