Everyone out of work or what do we do with half of humanity
Beyond the war in Ukraine and the rumours and hoaxes about Vladimir Putin's state of health, the news I found most disturbing last weekend was that ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence bot, has surpassed 500 million users worldwide, barely two months after its commercialisation. Created in Silicon Valley by the company OpenAI, it is an application specialising in dialogue through the GPT-3.5 model (Generative Pretrained Transformer), a sort of WhatsApp capable of creating the content that the user demands in just a few seconds. Microsoft, which is the main investor in Open AI, intends to offer GPT in all its products free of charge, at least for now.
It turns out that this chatbot, which was offered to the public at the end of last November, has shown itself capable of processing and generating texts at a speed brutally superior to that of human beings, so that it has already shown astonishing results in the production of stories, novels and even poetry. It is true that the texts I have been able to read, transcribed by El Debate and El Mundo, among others, would not win the Cervantes or the Nobel Prize, but the machine's capacity for learning and improvement is so fast that it won't be long before a novel written by this machine is indistinguishable from one written by any famous writer.
It has been a commonplace to say that the machine will never be able to translate experiences or emotions into a text of its own making, nor explain the world intuitively. It remains to be seen. For the time being, ChatGPT is replacing the work of many trades and professions where the intellectual takes precedence over the manual. This has long since been replaced by robots which, increasingly sophisticated, perform more complex tasks with a precision that far exceeds human capabilities. But there was considerable resistance to admitting that the work of a journalist, a film or television scriptwriter, a medical specialist or a judge could ever be replaced by Artificial Intelligence. Moreover, it was a common mantra to point out that the machine would not produce anything that had not been previously programmed by man. Without denying that a machine that does not experience emotions can develop what in humans we call free will, what is certain is that what is already verifiable is that basic intellectual tasks are carried out without problem and with meteorically increasing perfection by AI.
As a first derivative of all this, it is obvious to think that a multitude of human jobs, including the writing of this very article, may pass away in a very short time. In other words, hundreds of millions of people around the world will become unemployed. They will be told to retrain and adapt to the new times and to foster and develop their creativity, but it is highly doubtful that human beings have this gigantic and dizzying capacity for transformation. .
The machine is already capable of diagnosing cancer undetected by a plethora of great doctors in just a few seconds. In the judiciary, it is argued that the gravity and weight of a magistrate's judgement will never be achieved by a machine. This will be an interesting debate, as the development of these machines continues to advance unabated, especially because their lack of emotions may be an advantage when it comes to applying the law without the judge's feelings leading him or her to commit some kind of injustice, as a result of political or any other kind of pressure, when passing sentence.
What then is to be done with the hundreds of millions of people whose lives will no longer be governed by the work they do and the remuneration they receive for it? The answer must necessarily be on a global scale, because AI goes far beyond any borders. Nor do politicians seem to be able to promise voters solutions to such a huge problem without provoking grimaces of scepticism.
In addition to the calamities that are already ravaging the world, it is already certain that times of continuing uncertainty lie ahead. And, as a Chinese proverb says, "may fate spare you from interesting times". It seems highly likely that the current global struggle will lead to a new order. And in this new scenario, a radical change in the model of society in which these hundreds or billions of people have their place is inevitable. To do otherwise would be to exclude half of humanity. I believe, therefore, that we are facing a global problem that cannot be avoided, nor can it be solved with poultices.