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Approximately every 15 years, there comes a product that’s a leap beyond what we’ve known. It completely changes how we work. And then we take it for granted.
When Google Search came out, it worked so much better than what we had before. When the iPhone came out, we had a portable computer with a touch screen that was a leap beyond cell phones.
Now, ChatGPT has leaped beyond the search engine, and it has created a conversational programming language. By doing this, it has simplified programming to the point where almost everyone can do it — just like the iPhone simplified a computer so that nearly everyone can have one.
With ChatGPT, we can program a computer using human language. Before, we had to translate our requests into a sequence of commands, and then we had to execute them ourselves, behaving a bit like a computer. Now the computer does the computing so that we can be more human.
The current level of interest in artificial intelligence is unprecedented. Yet, what is artificial intelligence? A layman definition of AI is an artificial human-like mind, and that belongs in science fiction.
Instead, the real meaning of AI is the frontier of engineering: can we create programs that can execute tasks currently only humans can? Once the feat has been accomplished, humanity tends to take it for granted. We forget all those brave people who failed along the way, but who inspired others to continue, until some team finally prevailed.
For example, planning and schedule optimization used to be a province of AI, and now they are functions in a programming library. Face recognition used to be a province of AI, and now it’s a security feature of your smartphone.
In summary, we shouldn’t fear artificial intelligence taking over. We should worry about a billion people now being able to do computer programming. And a billion programmers are far less concerning than a billion people using the same search engine, the same social network, or the same colossal computer. Our civilization should not be subject to single points of failure.