The Dawn of AI

The arrival of ChatGPT onto the collective consciousness of Western society has been nothing short of phenomenal: it is estimated to have reached 100 million active users in January alone, making it the fastest growing consumer application in history. In late January, a professor at The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School found that the chatbot was able to pass a final exam on its MBA programme. As anyone who may have so prompted the application can attest, its rapping skills are not half bad either.

It has also accelerated, or perhaps reignited, deeper philosophical questions about what role AI is set to play in the way humans navigate everyday life when it achieves a sophistication that, while short of outright sentience, can effectively replace most components of the knowledge-based economy — and with it, jobs.

While it is tempting to reach for the pitchforks in a luddite frenzy, it is perhaps helpful to contextualise the arrival of more sophisticated technology against comparable post-Industrial Revolution developments, and indeed the fears of occupational redundancy that came with it — but which largely emerged to be unfounded.

The best analogy I can presently think of is the calculator. Prior to the introduction of more sophisticated calculators, governments and companies would employ thousands of people to calculate complex mathematical sums by hand. The digital calculator, and subsequently the computer, emancipated human beings from monotonous finger-counting to devote their collective energy towards bigger picture thinking and idea generation that allowed us to progress even further as a society.

Think of ChatGPT, and iterations of the application that will invariably follow, as a calculator for knowledge. Instead of having jobs that pay us to provide information, write articles, prepare presentations and build models, we will have jobs that emphasise traits that make us distinctly human — curiosity, creativity, ingenuity, collaboration, and critical thinking. Rather than being valued for retention of knowledge, we will be valued for navigating knowledge to solve problems.

All this means we need to start thinking about education in a fundamentally different way. We have long known that our education system is in need of an overhaul to keep up with the needs of an ever-changing society, but while change was historically needed to merely optimise for it, we now risk humans being entirely left behind by it. Anachronistic curricula and one-size-fits-all teaching methods, ubiquitous features of the Maltese educational experience for one, need to be replaced with dynamic and soft-skills based learning that can be customised to the personal strengths of the student. Memorisation and regurgitation need to be replaced with “open-book” navigation and problem-solving, and creating environments where real-world challenges can be simulated to explore solutions. Technology itself can help solve a lot of these challenges.

There will of course be a fair deal of disruption during the transitional period. But thanks to our resourcefulness — another distinctly human trait — I believe we will eventually learn how to harness this technology to our benefit in the next phase of human development, provided of course we make the right adjustments up front.