We toil for the glory of ChatGPT
The Bible is extremely into the idea that it’s good for human beings to work hard.
Here is a sample verse:
The hand of the diligent will rule, but the lazy man will be put to forced labor.
— Proverbs 12:24
Here is another good one:
The hardworking farmer should be the first to receive a share of the crops.
— 2 Timothy 2:6
And here is my favorite:
A person can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in their own toil. This too, I see, is from the hand of God.
— Ecclesiastes 2:24
I remember the last one from Sunday School because my teacher implied that we toiled for his pleasure as well as God’s, for he was an extension of God’s hand.
Thus began my lifelong distrust of religious authority.
Anyway.
I’m not here to write about my many religious grievances. (You’ll need to wait for my memoir, Coptic Bad Boy, for those.)
I’m here because of the emergence and continued popularity of ChatGPT, the AI-powered chat app from OpenAI that took the internet by storm at the end of 2022.
Ask it to write code for you, and it will:
Ask it to summarize the arguments for and against lab-grown meat as an AC/DC song, and it will do that too:
If you’ve used ChatGPT — and you have — you’ll know it’s error-prone. It’s bad at basic arithmetic. It hallucinates people and events. Like the B-School graduate it apparently is, ChatGPT makes errors confidently. Reality will not stop its rise.
Still, given the pace of technological progress, it’s easy to imagine what ChatGPT could become one day: a god that talks back.
Discussions have already begun about what ChatGPT means for the future of work. Which jobs will it automate? On what timeframe? Do we have an economic system capable of handling the inevitable dislocation?
These are all important questions. They will occupy several Davos Conferences.
But they miss the essential point: ChatGPT will disrupt something more profound than work. It will alter the thing human beings care about more than almost anything else: status.
Take the field of academia, for example, where researchers compete to find new truths (and seductive falsehoods) to publish in prestigious journals. If you ask them why, many would profess their love of capital-T Truth.
But which came first: that love or the culture that made it prestigious?
Here is a YouTube video of chimpanzees competing for status:
As someone who has attended many board meetings and academic conferences, I promise it all looks essentially the same. (Notice that I just signaled my own status. Alas, it’s status-signaling all the way down. Read this book to learn more about this phenomenon and sink into a deep depression.)
Anyway.
What happens to academia — this fragile system of institutional and cultural arrangements that channels status competition into something so valuable — when it’s run by AI?
If I’m a young academic learning about my discipline and trying to determine what’s next, I no longer talk to an advisor. I talk to a robot. I learn, but my learning is completely detached from the human beings who made it possible.
In such a world, why do more research? Why add to the compendium of the world’s knowledge when the best I can hope for is that I shift ChatGPT’s probability of answering one way and not another?
Of course, OpenAI, Google, and the other companies building our new deities may intuit these dynamics and take steps to address them. For example, they may prompt their robots to cite specific human beings more frequently. But what happens then? Will researchers compete to find the actual truth, or will they merely hack the machine by figuring out the precise combination of words that algorithms find mathematically pleasing? Are they professors or prophets?
Worse, our old gods didn’t need to monetize as aggressively as our new gods will. What if ChatGPT, Bing Chat, or another deity begins to favor advertisers who pay for the privilege?
Hmm, I seem to remember a Bible story about this too:
And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the money changers, and the seats of them that sold doves, And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.
— Matthew 21:12-13
Let’s say — hypothetically — that you’re starting a religion for a bunch of primates who recently transitioned from a surprisingly chill hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a miserable agrarian existence. These primates used to work a few hours per day to meet their needs, but now they must work all day every day to produce a blander and less nutritious diet.
Hypothetically, would your religion tell these primates to relax, take a load off, and engage in some self-care? Or would it ask them to work hard, really hard, even when they don’t want to?
Might you even connect their hard work to their chances of getting into heaven, i.e., Eden, the idyllic state of nature they left behind?
Anyway.
Human beings are really good at letting status dictate most of what they do, even as they blind themselves to that embarrassing reality. Indeed, Tom Wolfe called status the “fundamental taboo.” If AI fails to upend society in the ways I’m hinting at, it’s probably because we managed to collectively ignore its uncomfortable implications.
Alternatively, in 200 years, I wonder if an omnipotent AI will install all human children with a new commandment:
A PERSON CAN DO NOTHING BETTER THAN TO EAT AND DRINK AND GENERATE VALID TRAINING DATA FOR LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS. THIS, TOO, I SEE IS FROM THE HAND OF CHATGPT.