ChatGPT will amplify human effectiveness, but will also threaten human autonomy, agency and capabilities

BY SIMONE J. SMITH

“Simone, Simone,” my brother said excitedly. “I have to tell you about something that is going to take over the world. This is as big as when the world wide web was discovered.”

I stopped what I was doing to take what my brother had to say. He had never come to me so excited about news before.

“ChatGPT is an AI technology that allows you to have human-like conversations with a chatbot. This technology can: answer questions, and assist you with tasks, you know: emails, essays, code, that article that you are working on right now,” he said gesturing to my computer.

My ears perked up a little and I stopped typing to take in what he was saying.

“ChatGPT was created by OpenAI, an AI research company on November 30^th, 2022. You can use it for free now, because it is a research and feedback-collection phase. They have a paid subscription version called ChatGPT Plus that they launched on February 1^st.

OpenAI is also responsible for creating DALLE-2, which is a popular AI art generator, and Whisper, an automatic speech recognition system. ChatGPT is good, Simone. They have had over one million users in its first five days after launching. For sure they are going to eventually monetize this, because the demand is there. It took nine months for TikTok to reach 100 million users.

This is going to make a lot of jobs obsolete. This is the way of the future, so people better catch on.”

With that he walked away giddy, his head back in his phone.

I sat there and thought about what he had just told me. A coldness ran down my back as I thought of a future where AI would have this much control over our lives. It excited my brother, but I was dismayed.

“ChatGPT is scary good. We are not far from dangerously strong AI.” (Elon Musk, one of the founders of OpenAI)

I completely get the excitement about this new technology, but I had to do some research on what this could mean for us in the future, and what the community needs to prepare for.

There are some risks in building a machine that is capable of learning anything and everything, including how to reprogram itself to become an order of magnitude more intelligent than any human. One of the risks that has received a lot of media attention is that AI will take over the world, and from what I found, this idea can’t be ruled out.

The issue with this type of technological advancement is that selfish people will use AI to exert their own greed and control over other people. It is a compelling conundrum, and there is a lot to consider.

In a research article released by Pew Research Centre in 2018 titled, “Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humans,” they pointed to the fact that digital life is beginning to augment human capacities and disrupt human activities. The question they had was with this emerging algorithm-driven artificial intelligence continuing to spread, will people be better off than we are today?

Experts predict that AI will amplify human effectiveness, but will also threaten human autonomy, agency and capabilities. There is talk of the wide-ranging possibilities; that computers might match or even exceed human intelligence and capabilities on tasks such as: complex decision-making, reasoning and learning, sophisticated analytics and pattern recognition, visual acuity, speech recognition and language translation.

What about the risks?

There are some risks that we have to consider and take into account.

Human agency:

Individuals are experiencing a loss of control over their lives. People will begin to lack input and not learn the context about how the tools work. They will sacrifice: independence, privacy and power over choice; they have no control over these processes. This effect will deepen as automated systems become more prevalent and complex.

Data abuse:

Data use and surveillance in complex systems is designed for profit or for exercising power. Most AI tools will be in the hands of companies (profits) or governments (power). Values and ethics are often entered into the digital systems and will make people’s decisions for them. These systems are globally networked and not easy to regulate or rein in.

Job loss:

The AI takeover of jobs will widen economic divides, leading to social upheaval. Code-based machine intelligence will continue to disrupt all aspects of human work. People are worried about massive job losses, widening economic divides and social upheavals.

Dependence lock-in:

Reduction of individuals’ cognitive, social and survival skills. People’s deepening dependence on machine-driven networks has already started to erode people’s abilities to think for themselves, take action independent of automated systems and interact effectively with others.

It seems like the secret is out; machines are advancing exponentially and will eventually surpass human intelligence. Singularity (concept describes the moment AI exceeds beyond human control and rapidly transforms society) point may occur much sooner than is commonly thought.

We cannot ignore it. We have to stay vigilant and aware. The only way for this type of technology to take over is for us to buy into it. Are you open to having computers dictate your life, your children’s lives?