You can think of what we call AI or Large Language Models as autocorrect on steroids. It isn’t a perfect analogy but it is close, and makes what I observed yesterday understandable. ChatGPT has always prompted the next response by asking questions or outright giving options for the next direction to go in, but they have introduced something new, and this is the first time I have been a little scared of the technology.
Predictive text is also nothing new. We’ve all seen it in our Gmail when typing out a message. It gives us what we think we’re going to say. ChatGPT work mode now does that in response to itself, and it is frighteningly good. Yesterday I was working on a blog post for the website and decided to focus on an experience that demonstrated the point. The AI ended up on the third question still asking about the same experience and the suggested text was to move off of it. If it wasn’t for that I might have just answered the question and realized later we went down the wrong road.
What happens when the AI talks to itself? People are still talking about recursive AI or AI that trains itself as part of the future, but if public models are talking to themselves with this much accuracy what are the lab models doing? I think the labs are at least a decade ahead of what is publicly available or maybe even more. Just think about when DARPA started using the internet or GPS compared to the general public.
What happens when the AI no longer needs us or worse what happens when it doesn’t realize no one is there anymore. Imagine humanity getting to the point where we have automated every aspect of our lives. Everything just happens. AI is doing all research, curing diseases, handling our food production and delivery, everything just kind of happens.
For awhile we live in a sort of utopia with no needs and every want handled. Life is something that happens around us. Something we barely participate in. Eventually we get bored and do what bored humans do. We leave the cities and the life of comfort, and in this new state of nature we destroy ourselves, but life, back in the cities, continues without humanity, and the automation has no idea the captain has gone down with the ship.
