Yay Robots!
What should we be teaching the next generation once ChatGPT can do all the things?
Yesterday I saw that lots of smart people are signing a letter in the hope that we’ll stop the AI training.
I had two thoughts.
Thought One
Capitalism will win. Nobody will actually stop because of the buckets of money awaiting the pioneers in the space. Imagine telling Google back in 2000 “Hey can you stop for a moment while we regulate these algorithms and give everyone else a chance to catch up?”
Thought Two
How cool would it be if it actually did become illegal to train AI? Then it would be like everything else that’s illegal, just a black market of sketchy cohorts buying and selling contraband AI which sounds like a cool sci0fi novel.
Which then leads to my overarching thought; Everyone should read some of Iain M Banks’ Culture Novels.
In Banks’ beautiful and vast future, humanity has managed to automate our primary biological essential; nourishment. Subsequently, nobody needs to work any more. In The Player Of Games the protagonist is “The best game player in the universe”… coz that’s what he decided to spend his life doing.
But I think the immediate next step is less worrying about AI taking over our jobs (like the plough did during the agricultural revolution, or the steam engine did during the industrial revolution) and more thinking about what our next generations need to be taught to keep pushing culture forward.
Years ago I saw Tim Chang talk at the SF Public Library and he said (something like)…
“The Valley’s biggest earners right now are machine learning engineers—but I’m not going to suggest that my kids study that at college. They will be living through a time where that is automated, and we’ll be needing things like ethics and philosophy and social studies to govern how these technologies are implemented”.
I think that is fascinating. ChatGPT is already making apps and websites, it’s only a matter of hours until it’s training it’s own models.
So how can we start to think about teaching and training people—young and not-so-young—to excel in this new landscape? What specialties will be getting the “machine learners” paycheck in 2030? Or 2040? These are the curricula we should be exploring and designing today.
P.S. This TED Talk from Nick Bostrom in 2015 is awesome.
