Critical Thinking in the Time of Machine Intelligence
This is a historic moment. We are at the dawn of a revolution comparable to the invention of the wheel. ChatGPT started this most recent wave of AI popularity when it went from zero to one million users in only five days! People, organizations, and industries are all being disrupted in major ways.
Simple repetitive, physical and cognitive work has been increasingly automated over the past two centuries eliminating some jobs and creating others in management and technology. Now knowledge-work and creative-work are going to be increasingly taken over by AI Bots, destroying some of those jobs that were just created.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are changing how we think about the world and how we think about human intelligence. On command, LLMs like GPT-3 generate and summarize text, and can even write poetry. Generative AI can create images and video from text commands. In fact, the illustration for this article was generated by an AI Bot.
Today’s AI Bots are far from perfect. They sometimes make mistakes. They may come up with racist, misogynistic, or violent responses. In fact, they sometimes intentionally lie. With their intelligence outpacing ours in an increasing number of domains, how long will it be until AI Bots can do a better job of propagating lies and mistakes than humans?
