Artificial Intelligence could be assistive technology and that may disrupt everything.

In the news cycle lately, there has been a lot of discussion surrounding A.I. generated art and writing. I myself have played around with "Stable Diffusion," which is one of the several computer-powered programs out there wherein a user can plug in a variety of different criteria and get an image generated for you within minutes. The same kind of input can be used to generate written materials and reports. The New York Times recently examined one such thing from OpenAI called ChatGPT, and it said that it was "inspiring awe and fear." Here's another quote from the same article: "ChatGPT is quite simply the best artificial intelligence chatbot ever released to the general public." Here's one example of its power that was placed online for others to examine:

And ChatGPT isn't even OpenAI's best A.I. model. However, people are already saying that it is going to have an impact on society as big as the invention of the iPhone or as big as Google.

So what does this mean for writers and writing? Well, dare I say that we contemplate a future where nobody needs to be a good writer because A.I. can write whatever it is you're trying to write for you, and write it better? I graduated a long time ago in 1994, but I look at this and see that my educational experience from college has been rendered obsolete. I feel sorry for anyone that has graduated much closer to 2023 with similar degrees as mine.

All the papers that I wrote from scratch can now more easily be written by A.I. And that speaks to my next point: education is going to be immensely affected by this new technology. My co-worker's son used ChatGPT to write an essay for his college class, and the professor had no clue that he hadn't written it. He received a "B" grade for it. And he literally did no work other than feed a prompt into a computer and then went on to play video games with his remaining time. Fun stuff, right? There's also no way to effectively stop people from using this technology. Why? Because in the end, it's just another kind of assistive technology.

You may ask, what is assistive technology? Well, it is technology that helps people with disabilities to overcome obstacles that may prevent them from functioning like an able-bodied individual. But I will tell you from experience, practically everything qualifies as a disability nowadays, and accommodations are everywhere. Think you have trouble doing math? Well, you may have a math disability and therefore you get to use a computer program that will calculate things for you so that you don't have to. See where this is going? That kind of thing is called an "accommodation."

Here's another example: you have difficulty writing and say it is because of a traumatic brain injury due to playing football in high school? ChatGPT could be an "accommodation" that helps you write the essay that you could have written if it wasn't for that injury. With disability, it is rare to actually question whether a person would have had the ability to do a thing if the disability were removed. It is usually assumed that they could. So with the rise of these kinds of things that could be construed as "cheating," it may become important for people to be evaluated on knowledge, skills, and abilities that they might normally possess in order to determine if the use of an artificial intelligence is warranted.

Imagine having that discussion and what it would look like. Awkward doesn't even describe it, and "illegal" comes to mind with regard to rating other human beings. You sit before a committee that decides that (even without your learning disability) you would never have been good at math or writing. They decide that this was your "natural" state and thus, you don't qualify to use an artificial intelligence cheat bot as assistive technology because they want to see what you could normally do without it. Yet, the next person does get to use it and comes off as more professional, which then looks a lot like discrimination. Ugh...what a can of worms. And I don't think there's going to be a solution unless we (as a society) are willing to ask some very uncomfortable and awkward questions and face some awful truths: not all people are created equal, and those of us who got the short end of the stick should not be allowed to use artificial intelligence and computers to even the odds. Otherwise, education, talent, and certifications will start to lose their value in many white collar applications.

Contemplating all of this makes me want to look to the future and imagine how this will all unfold. There's this narrative that I've seen where people say robots and artificial intelligence will liberate us all from the drudgery of jobs and that we will all have lives wherein we can focus on human connection in a liberal utopia. As much as I'd want this to happen, and to be a member of a society wherein we have enough time to pursue fun things and build connections and travel, I think there is a more likely (and very dark) scenario. See...things like housing and food cost money. We all know this, and the prices on those two things alone are soaring along with everything else.

I think what the future looks like is more likely to be this: artificial intelligence makes it so that companies can get by on very few workers, making them richer than they are even now (and corporations are going gangbusters by any measure). None of this wealth will be shared. And prices will continue to go up. People will have no source of income except the trickle that comes from government disability checks and social security. This future is one where 70% of people are just poor, and people die all the time from poverty. And then there's this cream of the crop of people who live incredible lives, exploiting, over consuming, harassing, and doing whatever they want because they have all the money. I think that this is the future that artificial intelligence will unlock for us. It isn't going to be a Skynet or a Wargames scenario. It's going to be a scenario where good paying jobs are super rare, and only a few people get them while everyone else must be a servant and work until they die and honestly...nobody cares. As a person who is childless and with no stakes in the game, I'm fascinated to see if this comes true. I'm also fascinated to see if society finds any way to stop this from coming true, and if so, what exactly that looks like. Maybe it looks like telling people who could greatly benefit from using a tool that, "You can't use this, because it is bad for society as a whole! I don't care that you suffer. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one!" But how many people are capable of being that mean? We live in a society where (for many) their own virtue is the most sacred of things. If you do have children though, I think you should be a little worried as to how the next generation is going to pay the bills. People may need to discard virtue in order to embrace survival.

But, what do I know? I'm just a guy trying to understand how things work. At 51, I'm becoming more confused every single day when trying to answer that question.