Other than the FIFA World Cup 2022 that concluded last night, Chat GPT is another topic of interest that has been trending recently. What does it mean for us?
AI will replace human intelligence! This has been going on for some time now. Well, even being one of the ardent advocates of technology, I don’t believe in this. Technology will only attempt to replicate human intelligence and it will always remain its benchmark.
Right from the calculator days, there has been discussion that technology is replacing humans. But, to its best it has only been able to act as an aide to humans. The only progression since has been that humans have developed technology that is able to take up tasks on the complexity continuum and we get astonished to see what technology can do.
With AI coming to play, yes technology has got into the space of decision making like humans. In many cases its able to guzzle immense data and information and take instant decisions, which average human brain might not be able to match. However, whatever technology is able to decide is decided by the algorithms developed by humans.
Even when I asked Chat GPT about what it can do, the answer was “… technology that is designed to generate human-like text.” The benchmark here again remains a human being.
A human being performs different tasks on a horizon where physical labour is on the one side and intelligence on the other. All activities are somewhere mix of both and depending on the nature of the task there will be a proportion of physical plus mental activity involved. Technology on the other hand has two variants to offer – automation and intelligence. In pre-AI era, it has been mostly automation impacting the physical nature of jobs and tasks that humans do. Gradually, we saw the bottom of the pyramid opportunities, which were primarily skewed towards physical activities on the activity horizon, getting replaced by technology resulting in lower dependence on human beings. This resulted in lesser opportunities for what we know as blue-collar workers. However, thought leaders and policy makers realised that there is a need for upskilling and reskilling so that such workforce can find appropriate livelihood opportunities. This has today resulted in job avenues that never existed before. Also, with technology adoption, there have been several new opportunities to earn livelihood. One of the classic examples is of aggregation apps, which has resulted in several jobs for delivery folks.
With AI now layering almost all the existing technologies and domains of economy, technology is graduating in its capabilities and gaining competencies to replicate human intelligence. This is where technology is now overlapping the competencies of white-collar workforce. Chat GPT is one such exhibit of what AI powered technologies can do. However, this does not mean again that humans will become dispensable, and technology will take over. It only means technology can now aide humans in more complex tasks especially those involving mental activities.
Capabilities like Chat GPT will help humans expedite things and focus more on intellectual activities that will only benefit the humanity at large. The more technology is able to aide us in routine works, we will be able to spend more time on bigger challenges.
While Chat GPT like applications will continue to help us solve complex problems, the fun element of having conversations and getting exposed to the next level of conversational computing will keep all of us excited. As we keep on finding evolved use cases of Chat GPT, let the BOT Cheet (read Baat cheet or conversation in Hindi) continue.
