I was having a conversation this week about ChatGPT, AI in general, and what the technology might mean for the future. I’ve continued to experiment with the ChatGPT interface and have found several resources that have helped me write prompts that get more out of the tool. In the short term, I’m now convinced that the people who learn how to interact with these new AI tools will see massive productivity increases and rapidly outcompete others, at least in the domains in which the AI tools function.

During the conversation, a thought came to be in the form of a connection to another idea I heard on a podcast a few weeks prior. I haven’t spent hours and hours turning over this thought, but that is one of the purposes of the act of writing. The thought is this—these AI technologies are going to do to the digital world what the discovery of the neutron did to the physical world. The discovery of the neutron opened up the possibility of nearly unlimited energy by tapping into potential of which we had known nothing previously. It also led to nuclear weapons. These versions of AI systems are surely already being weaponized (after all, the real breakthrough of ChatGPT was to make the outputs more human-like; there are already more advanced AI systems that have been created), but the effects will only compound as future iterations are created and released. Sure, nearly every new technology comes with positives and negatives and metaphors have their limits, but this one does have a Pandora’s box sort of feeling to it. Or maybe more of a 1984 feeling to it. And if that inkling is correct, then it is already too late to reclose this particular Pandora’s box. It probably isn’t too late to course correct, but my knowledge of how these systems work is too limited to allow even a half-educated guess as to how that might occur.