LF03 | Gleefully Procrastinating Tinkerers

GPT ushers in (at least) four seismic shifts. And that's just in its first week.

Source: Stable Diffusion

This was the week that generative AI went mainstream. By massively increasing the availability of free high quality personalized written words and images, it has devalued a lot of what people spend their time doing, and raised any number of new opportunities. With the field moving at white hot speed, and a new better version coming any time, this hot take will doubtless be out of date the moment it’s published. With that caveat, I’m seeing this radically changing education, requiring a recognition of and investment in ‘brain capital’, growing demand for authenticity, giving us all personal assistants, and shifting value to human experiences. Among others. Let’s start there.

Upending educating - cyborg co-pilots and a lifecourse approach

Our education system has been unfit for purpose for a while, and now needs a radical overhaul. School teachers would have let out an anguished cry this week, wondering how they’re going to be able to mark essays. And of course the answer is, they’re not. At least not in the traditional way. Calculators removed the premium on math skills, Google removed the premium on facts and GPT has removed the premium on summarizing and synthesizing. Educators will need to recognize AI as a tool and support ‘cyborg skills’ that build and extend on what AI enables. And offer it throughout the lifecourse. Providing “education” as memorizing facts for a few years in the early years of life will need to change to an ongoing, personalized and adaptive curriculum that helps people evolve as they age. Singapore’s Skills Future is doing good work here. 

Recognizing and investing in ‘brain capital’ 

AI won’t replace our brains but will make it more important that we use them at the ‘top of their license’. Brain capital is a new concept that’s emerged over the last couple of years that  aims to prioritize our brain health and skills in the modern economy. It’s “looking at the health of the brain, management of disorders, education, preparedness and looking at them from across the lifespan”, according to Harris Eyre, one of its tireless advocates. Brain capital is providing a new way to connect the niche health topic of mental wellness into a broader economic development agenda. Investing in brain health and brain capital as an asset will be ever more important for individuals, cities and economies. If you’re interested in this topic, catch Harris at Monday’s Looking Forward event.

New tools for managing authenticity

In a heart-warming but thought provoking story, OpenAI (via a mentor) enabled a young man to build a landscaping business. He lacked communication and business skills but clearly has drive and was open to being helped. I wonder how the relationship with the client/s who paid $200k will evolve? Perhaps there’s an expectation that the gardener would also act as a peer and a coach, brainstorming the next iteration of the owner’s horticultural vision. Or not, let’s see.  There’ll be a premium on knowing if someone ‘approved this message’ and also if the message is in fact true, or confidently wrong. 

It’s now trivial to emulate the voice of someone and make them say whatever you want. I expect we’ll soon hear prominent politicians making strange sounding statements; Hillary acknowledging her deep state network or Trump wistfully longing for his father’s approval or heavens, even finding his daughter attractive. Where does one go to know to find the source? Fred Wilson suggests signing everything. Finally, a compelling use for blockchain?

Asynchronous agents and ubiquitous EAs

In the week or so that GPT has emerged, we’ve enjoyed typing in queries and marvelling at the results that expand a couple of words into thoughtful essays, poems, diagnostic tools, recipes or code bases for an app. It also lets us condense lengthy bodies of work into core concepts and pithy takeaways. These have generally required us humans to be engaging in real time with a robotic overlord. Before long we’ll have an agent we can train to look for stuff for us or get things done, as our AI now interacts with the universe of others. Want to request a different hotel room, query an airline or chase down a billing error from a health plan? Soon we’ll be outsourcing these jobs. 

From transactions to human experiences

A vet I was speaking to recently, says the quality of the advice delivered by ChatGPT in response to the kinds of basic queries that she fields every day is impressive. She could in theory, help 10x as many patients a day operating in a remote capacity, avoiding a commute, pleasantries, and the adminsitrivia of filing in forms and processing payments (see ubiquitous EAs, above), and instead focusing on making sure the drafts prepared by GPT are accurate, and adding an extra touch.

I would say however, that people don’t just pay for getting their job done, they pay to identify with a brand, the community it gives them access to, and the feeling that engenders. In-person will be ever more important - the sensory experience of connecting with others and being in a pleasant venue. There are also certain conditions which present identically but animals give off a distinctive smell with a certain type of disease (such as ketone breath for diabetes). 

This is only just scratching the surface. It’s been a whirlwind week and things will only get stranger and quicker. I can assure you that I, Stephen Johnston, wrote this (but how do you know that it’s me assuring you….?), and I will endeavour to stay abreast of developments, and how they impact Looking Forward’s themes of healthy longevity, impact and Web3. If you have questions or suggestions, do reach out and meanwhile, happy Glorious Perusing and Tinkering.