Predicting now that the singularity is not going to be because AI gets super smart – but rather that it will be super stupid but _sound_ smart.
ChatGPT is already a system that takes far longer to fact check than it does to generate things that _sound_ correct. This will now only get worse.
I think the billions of written documents circulated in offices every day are going to become increasingly untrustworthy and eventually the whole small-rectangle-based economy will collapse.
Think about how many forms we fill in every day for example that you can be sure never get properly checked. It's probably not long before funding applications are written and graded by AI, just like CVs often are now.
Think about the amount of pieces of writing that we are told to do in offices or school that get skimmed once if you're lucky.
Our whole economy is held up by implicit trust and the documents have always been more important that they look right than are right.
@kim If you are afraid that an infinite bullshit generator is coming to take your job, you are probably in a bullshit job.
@kim I wouldn't discount ChatGPT's genuine intelligence. I've been using it for programming and it's pretty damn good.
There's a lot of work to do but I can see it replacing my job someday. It's already reducing my cognitive load significantly.
@kim I hope not. Requiring Face-to-face meetings is an ableist practice. The rise of better virtual meeting platforms has enabled so many people who will be hurt by required in-person interactions.
@kendraleonard i mean face to face figuratively not litearlly - as in knowledge that goes via a document as intermediary will look increasgingly suspect.
Pretty soon I think we will see a shift back to only really trusting face-to-face relationships - anything on a screen or document will probably take as much work to validate its correctness as simply talking to the person who supposedly wrote it.
It's kind of ironic that what ChatGPT has made possible more than anything is the contents of Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" – jobs that the whole economy is precariously built upon.