"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." --Ken Olsen, founder Digital Equipment Corp., 1977
Humans are correct about technology and its impact on society until we are not correct. Which I’d say is most of the time. In fact, I’d argue we’ve usually got no idea what effect a given kind of new technology will mean for this world, in a year or five years or a decade or a generation. We may try and be savvy soothsayers about all things technological, and do our homework, research things, but even then, it is a fool’s game, at least for this fool.
Look at poor Ken Olsen, quoted at the start of this essay. In 1989, he was the founder and CEO of Digital Equipment Corporation, by then the largest private employer in Massachusetts with 34,000 employees in the state. If you lived in Massachusetts then, you definitely knew at least one person who worked at DEC. It was high tech heaven. Olsen was considered a high-tech genius and DEC dominated the mid-size computer industry. But in 1977 he’d also infamously opined about what he saw as the silly notion that anybody would actually ever want a computer in their home.
Olsen of course was very wrong and then some, but to cut him some slack, most of us, even the pundits, the so-called experts, have little or no idea what might happen in the culture because of a new scientific discovery, or a new product or a new process or anything never seen before.
Like Olsen’s prediction about home computers. I mean what might follow a “home computer?” A computer network that provided anyone anywhere with immediate and free access to more information than ever before in all of human history? No way. Just ask the journalists Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel who had this now comical discussion on NBC’s “The Today Show” morning news program sometime in 1994.
Gumbel: “What is ‘internet’ anyway?”
Couric: “Internet is…ah…that massive computer network, the one that’s becoming really big now.”
Gumbel, clearly exasperated: “What do you write to it, like mail?!”
This trip down technological memory lane is a good lesson for anyone (me included) who is freaking out, or tempted to freak out, about the latest new shiny piece of tech: ChatGPT. What? You’ve never heard of it? Don’t you have….’INTERNET’!
As I understand it, (I think) ChatGPT is, in part, an artificial intelligence program capable of creating original prose, based upon requests from a user, say, like me. Today I asked ChatGPT (found at openai.com where I registered for a demo) to write an opening paragraph for a blog post and opinion piece arguing against ChatGPT as a tool for writing. Here’s what it gave me: “ChatGPT is a terrible way to write. It encourages poor grammar, spelling, and punctuation. It also promotes lazy thinking.”
Hmmm. Not exactly Pulitzer Prize level prose. Not much like the kind of opening sentence I try to create when I write. ChatGPT’s three sentence polemic kind of reads like the earnest thoughts of a high school sophomore in English Class, and their first draft of a persuasive essay assignment: “Why I Don’t Like ChatGPT.”
So, for now, this is what I know in terms of prognosticating. I do not know what ChatGPT holds for me or for other creative types or for the world we live in. I do not know how it might (or might not) change things like education or professional writing or business writing. But that’s a pretty normal place to be when some new hot cultural bauble or trend or program like ChatGPT first arrives. It is just beginning to enter into the messy and unpredictable mix of cultures and peoples.
Who knows what lies ahead?
I do not and if someone pretends that they do know where ChatGPT might take us, they are fibbing, showing off, or just blowing smoke. They know much less than they are letting on. Yet this I absolutely know. Technology like ChatGPT is just amazing and I am so grateful that I’ve gotten to live in times when some of the most world changing tech and knowledge has come to be and come to be discovered. Think of it: in my lifetime I’ve seen computers and then home computers and then smartphones, and of course the internet. I’ve seen scientific advancements and care for the very sick improve by leaps and bounds, now seeming like miracles at times.
God gives us humans, brains and so humans can then use those brains to invent and imagine and make life better for the many. THANK YOU GOD!
Technology like ChatGPT is finally a tool. It is up to us to discern how to best to use that tool for the greatest good and the common good. For God’s good too. As artificial intelligence advances (and it most certainly will) I am excited and yes, I am worried.
But at least for now, I think I’m still able to write a better sentence than ChatGPT.
For now…
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