The genius software that could disrupt everything you know

Monday, 12 December 2022

Dr Paul Duignan is a psychologist and strategist who has been involved in policy and research on the impact of new technology, and has also developed award-winning software.

OPINION: As the science fiction author Arthur C Clarke famously said, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.

And that can be your experience when you first play with OpenAI's new system, ChatGPT. It is also why there is starting to be media buzz about its potential impact on the knowledge professions.

For those who have not yet had the opportunity to play with it, we can think about what it does in the following way.

The internet put all of the world's information into one seriously large book. Google gives us an index with a list of relevant pages related to the information we are seeking. But the user still needs to integrate the information from various pages into a meaningful overview.

Now, ChatGPT has revolutionised this process.

In effect, it provides a genius polymath who has memorised the whole damn book. And they are now operating as your personal knowledge concierge.

They are on call 24/7, and they will, within a few seconds, give you a concise summary of all the information in the book relating to any subject under the sun.

From a technical point of view, ChatGPT has not actually memorised the entire book, but from the user's point of view, it appears as if it has done so.

But ChatGPT does not just stop at providing you with mere summaries.

It will write you what looks like a credible confidentiality clause for a contract, summarise how you can diagnose an illness, give you a technical description of an obscure term in your field of work, give you a list of questions that you are likely to be asked at a job interview in a specific area, write computer code, and on and on.

It will then let you narrow the question down with follow-up questions. The way it can let you specify the information and the format in which you want is where it really adds value over current internet search, and it is uncanny.

ChatGPT is catching some serious flak, and this is to be expected.

The major current criticisms can be summarised as: sometimes, it can provide answers which include personal and institutional sexism, racism and other biases; it doesn't produce anything original; and sometimes, it makes technical mistakes.

The fate of ChatGPT will be determined in the next few months, as people debate whether these problems are so bad that it should not be used.

Interestingly, a similar system, Meta’s Galactica for scientific writing, was closed down because of the falsehoods it was producing.

In the interim, there are some obvious things that you can do when trying out and using ChatGPT.

Treat it like a crazed uncle or aunt who is over for Christmas dinner. Don’t talk to them about politics, race or gender, unless you want a toxic mess.

Be on the alert regarding everything they say to check for built-in biases.

Don't expect them to come up with blindingly original thoughts.

And if it's a subject you don't know anything about, or where you cannot generally judge the soundness of their advice from your own experience and knowledge, don’t ask them for technical information, as they may simply be wrong.

But you could still ask them a lot of stuff that would be useful in areas that are not controversial.

For instance, if they are a lawyer, you could ask them how to write an IP clause; if they are a plumber, how you fix a tap; if a doctor, how to treat your hives.

You get the picture – used carefully, ChatGPT, has the potential to be an extraordinary time saver. It is a one-stop shop for information on just about anything that you may ever need information on.

Unless it causes some catastrophic problems in its initial roll-out, I suspect it will survive.

As long as its knowledge is regularly updated, people will probably apply the 80/20 rule at the end of the day. They will decide that using ChatGPT carefully will often be good enough for their purposes.

After all, no-one guarantees that what is on the pages that Google searches return is 100% accurate, but we all still use it.

So how may ChatGPT radically disrupt the work of knowledge professionals?

If you think about it, we ask knowledge professionals – lawyers, consultants, doctors, journalists, engineers for instance - questions that we want answered. They make their living by overviewing the relevant area of knowledge, summarising it and putting it into actionable formats for us. We then pay them good money for doing this work.

For a starter, ChatGPT will be a serious time saver for knowledge professionals, allowing them to overview specific aspects of their subject domain quickly.

They will then be able to focus on providing their clients with the remaining highly specific parts of tightly tailored information.

But as to what will happen more generally, all bets are off.

Whether it will impact the overall demand for knowledge professionals depends on the extent of over- or under-supply in professionals in a particular area of knowledge.

It also depends on the legal requirements existing in some areas, about having to obtain and act on advice from human experts.

If you are a knowledge worker and want to see for yourself what it can do, try asking it some of the typical types of questions you spend your days answering in your professional work.

When it comes to general questions, which is what much of the advice provided by professionals consists of, I think you will see it serving up answers that look exactly like, if not sometimes better than, what you would tell a client and doing so in a few seconds.

The ultimately big question here is whether your clients will continue to pay you the premium for what your expertise can give, or come to believe that they can, most of the time, get away with relying on ChatGPT.

ChatGPT is definitely magic, and it is about to pull a whole host of bunnies out of the hat.

Precisely what all these bunnies will look like and what chaos and opportunities they will produce is still far from clear. But whatever is going to happen, the sooner you get to check it out, the better.