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Will ChatGPT Kill Us All?

The pace of the adoption of generative AI (ChatGPT is one implementation of genAI) continues to be extraordinarily rapid. If anything, genAI’s adoption and fears of the consequences of its adoption are accelerating, which is as interesting to me as the technology itself and a determinant in its perceived threats.

Our fears over genAI are nothing new. Most existed long before the neighbor’s cat caught its first rat.

Last week, technology executives gathered at the Capitol to discuss regulating genAI with lawmakers. Mark me down as a skeptic: on the technology executive side, the participants were jockeying for advantage in exploiting the technology. They would have passed if they weren’t slathering to exploit genAI. They argued for restraining their competitors. But themselves? Oh no.

The lawmakers were striking poses against the evil tech execs and trying to establish genAI creds with their constituents. Little was accomplished, although, predictably, everyone promised to continue the discussion. At least while the cameras roll and the press clamors for coverage.

If the lawmakers are serious, which they very well should be, I suggest they call in genAI engineers, scientists, and academics. The discussion would take more effort to understand and generate fewer sound bites. The proceedings would look more like a classroom than a carnival. Far less idle entertainment, but not a complete waste of the time and resources.

Our fears over genAI are nothing new. Most existed long before the neighbor’s cat caught its first rat.

We fear AI will develop an unstoppable super virus that will kill off humankind. Moses used that threat to goad Pharoah into listening to the brickmakers local. But what stopped the Covid-19 pandemic? Vaccines, not tracking down the origin of the virus.

Maybe AI-aided hackers will take over the power grid. Plain old hackers did quite well at shutting down Iran’s uranium purification plant, as did the creeps who brought down Saudi oil refineries. Better and stricter cybersecurity would have stopped both those efforts. AI had nothing to do with it.

What if cheating with AI vitiates education? Cheating didn’t start with ChatGPT, nor will it end if genAI disappears. Students who know the value of learning, not the illusory advantages of arbitrary ticket punches, don’t cheat. Convince students that they will be rewarded in life for what they learn, not the grades they receive, and cheating will be gone.

Which brings us to the biggest fear of all: loss of jobs.

The disappearance of typing pools shows how genAI will change the job market, although crystal ball weather is always cloudy.

Desktop computers and copy machines obliterated typing and stenographic pools starting in the 1970s. Eliminating those pools transformed the nature of office work, and the role of women in the workplace changed dramatically. Women in the office today are far more numerous and significant than they were in the 40s, 50s, and 60s when most were typists, stenographers, and secretaries.

Did the replacement of typing and stenography with copy machines and desktop computers drag women kicking and screaming to become technicians, managers, and executives? Or did the desire of women for greater agency inspire machines that replaced typists and stenographers? You may prefer chickens or eggs but we’re still talking poultry. The workplace of Mad Men is gone.

The disappearance of typing pools shows how genAI will change the job market, although crystal ball weather is always cloudy.

Some kinds of desk work will change radically. The ubiquity of computer network based communications (the internet and the world wide web) has flooded us with words. Has the inundation improved or degraded written discourse? Opinions differ. There’s good writing on the internet, bad writing, and, predictably, a ton of mediocre writing, good enough to convey its intended message, but not of much merit in itself.

Starting in about 2000, some people have made a living producing mediocre network content. They write coherent and passable paragraphs about any subject, not unlike typists and stenographers who transformed anything dictated to them into words on paper. Some of these folks are being replaced by ChatGPT. Since using tools like ChatGPT is cheap and easy, more will be replaced.

GenAI has flaws. It makes things up (the current term is “hallucinates”) unpredictably. Its output is often boring and lifeless, sometimes nonsense. GenAI recipes range in quality from average to inedible. You can bet that developers are working nights and weekends to address these and other genAI issues.

In the 1980s, word processors froze periodically. It’s rare now, but they still do. Bugs still crawl through their algorithms, but only a tiny fraction compared to early times. I put in a few nights and weekends myself killing word processor bugs. They still aren’t perfect, but the easiest place to find a typewriter now is a museum, not an office.

In the 1960s and 70s, most women quit calling typing a career. They were no longer only trained fingers that operated a machine for putting words on paper in conventionally accepted spelling.

What will those who lose their jobs to genAI do and how will work change with genAI? I predict more jobs and more words. Some will move on to jobs they prefer like dog walking or nuclear physics, others will muddle on doing whatever comes next, but the flood of words will not abate.

Perhaps, faced with competition from mediocre genAI, the general quality of internet writing will improve. Yeah. Right.

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China’s Woes

The decline in China’s economy has occupied the economic press lately. Fifty years ago, I studied more in classical Chinese than English. I was working on a PhD. thesis on China of the Confucian era. Many of the basic tenets of traditional Chinese government and economics go back to Confucius and his followers in the Yellow River Valley, like much of western tradition goes back to Athens and Jerusalem of classical antiquity, which was roughly contemporaneous with Confucius. Maybe sunspots or a burst of cosmic radiation spurred civilization onward, although that ignores the great civilizations of Africa and the Americas.

It grieves me that I can’t say “I told you so,” to those who thought China would never get beyond the chaos of Mao because I didn’t tell anyone.

That bit of personal history has shaped my views of China. In the 1970s, China was in the bitter throes of the cultural revolution, but I concluded that China, if it could ever shake off its legacy of western colonial oppression and poverty, was a better platform for 20th century western market-driven capitalism than Max Weber’s characterization of the protestant ethic.

I wish I had published those views to refer to now, but I didn’t, so you will have to take my word for them. Herrlee Creel, my mentor at the University of Chicago, hinted at this view in his bestseller of 1949, Confucius: The Man and the Myth, in which he argued that Confucius held democratic ideals. I do not entirely agree with my mentor on that, but Joseph Needham’s encyclopedic Science and Civilization in China convinces most readers that traditional Chinese society fostered scientific and technical innovation. I assert that Confucian world view fostered individual initiative bolstered by a vigorous familial system. A budding entrepreneur in traditional China was more likely to receive encouragement and financial support than a western protestant in recent centuries.

The last decade of the 20th century and the first two decades of the 21st century have proved me right. Family support of entrepreneurship has helped the contemporary rise of the Chinese economy. It grieves me that I can’t say “I told you so,” to those who thought China would never get beyond the chaos of Mao because I didn’t tell anyone.

A common trope is a Chinese gangster who starts firing a weapon and can’t stop until the magazine is empty. The trope is pure xenophobia and racism, but it reminds me of the Chinese official policies on Covid-19.

I read a lot of popular American detective and mystery fiction written in the 1930s and 40s. A common trope is a Chinese gangster who starts firing a weapon and can’t stop until the magazine is empty. The trope is pure xenophobia and racism, but it reminds me of the Chinese official policies on Covid-19.

China’s initial reaction to Covid-19 was a crackdown: mandatory masks, draconian quarantines, workers locked in factories, and whole cities shutdown over scattered cases of the virus. The policy was successful. China kept their death toll down and their economy led the world in the early years of the pandemic.

But like the gangster with the machine gun, the CCP could not take its finger off the trigger until the gun was empty; the rest of the world was in recovery and Covid-19 restrictions were holding China back when Emperor Xi Jinping let up and abruptly tossed the zero-Covid weapon aside; Covid-19 roared back. Death tolls rose and China’s internal economy suffered.

Information on current events in China passes through many filters. Closest to the ground, reports are tailored for a favorable response from the next level up in the government. The Chinese government filters and massages published information to shore up their position. Then western agendas kick into gear and add their own layers of distortion. And finally, your lowly servant here is picking and choosing to tell a story that will keep your interest.

I won’t go into the details of China’s current economic woes. I suggest reading The Economist on the subject or any business publication for more information. Most are gloating over the inherent weakness of authoritarian governments.

I agree that authoritarians are weak, I won’t go into why I think that, but I haven’t seen that the commentators have taken into consideration the peculiar nature of traditional China’s authoritarian empire, which has failed, recovered, and triumphed over and over for the last two thousand years. A more resilient empire than the Romans or the British.

There’s an old Chinese saying: The mountains are high and the emperor is distant. (Shān gāo, huángdì yuǎn.) It’s used in many situations, but slow, unreliable communication in the empire frequently served as a buffer between alternate centers of power and culture and the sometimes inept central government located wherever the emperor happened to sit.

I am forced to wonder if the flattened mountains and shortened roads of twenty-first century communications and transportation have worsened China’s current economic woes. The west has a century of experience with rapid communications and a well-informed populace. China does not.

I am watching carefully.

Hold fast. Be patient. Keep trying.