Will AI take our jobs?
All of us have heard about AI by now. But I was surprised to know two AIs have already passed the Turing test: LaMDA AI and Chat GPT. Passing the Turing test simply means a human can no longer distinguish a machine's conversation from that of a human. Naturally, I had to try it out myself. Since Google's LaMDA AI is not open to the public, I opted for testing OpenAI's ChatGPT 3.
In a nutshell, this is revolutionary.
Here is an example: I asked it to solve a simple problem for me using Google Sheets.
How to determine if a value exists in a column in Google Sheets?
AI Response:
Great, that worked. But what if I am not familiar with the COUNTIF function? What if, I want to achieve the same result with VLOOKUP? So I made a follow-up request.
How to do this with vlookup instead?
AI Response:
Without missing a beat, ChatGPT was able to solve the problem with my preferred function! Has AI just made learning Excel obsolete? Notice how I did not even need to repeat the instructions again, it was able to get the context.
Okay, let's ask the AI to solve a pretty standard coding question.
Can you write a python script that converts a list to a string?
AI Response:
Not only did it give me the correct code, it also explained how the code works.
Well this could make some of us nervous; how long before a cousin of ChatGPT makes our jobs obsolete? Let’s ask the AI how to save our jobs from being taken over by machines.
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How do I protect myself so that I don't lose my job due to AI and automation?
AI Response:
Solid advice. Notice how the AI does not say I am being paranoid, which means it also agrees there is a good probability that AI will start replacing existing jobs if we don't upskill ourselves.
But I want to make sure this advice applies to me, so I give ChatGPT some context about my current work situation.
I work in a technology startup in the customer success department. Does the same advice apply to me?
AI Response:
Again, a very logical and succinct explanation from ChatGPT.
However at this point, I would like to highlight no matter how smart the AI might sound, and even if it has passed the Turing test, it still doesn’t actually understand the words it is typing out. To ChatGPT, all my words are just a signal and what it types out is an output based on that signal; albeit this output is calculated based on a complex language model, but at the end of the day it’s still just a mathematically calculated output. This is not to say AI couldn't become sentient at some point in the future, that event is what futurists call Singularity. But we aren't at that point yet (although a Google employee was recently fired for claiming one of their internal AI chatbot has become sentient).
Why not confirm this with ChatGPT? Let's see if we have reached singularity already.
Do you understand what you are saying or are you just putting up a veil of intelligence where you don't really grasp the words that are coming out of your model.
AI Response:
ChatGPT freely admits that it does not understand what it is saying. It is just spewing out words that make sense to humans, because the language model has trained itself with a feedback loop over and over again with a massive dataset.
I guess our jobs are somewhat safe. For now.
Note 1: ChatGPT 4 comes out sometime next year.
Note 2: If you want to try some fun prompts with ChatGPT, visit this Github