I'm pretty sanguine. Back in high school, I spent a lot of time with two sorts of people: the ultra-nerdy and people who also came from chaotic backgrounds. One of my friends in the latter group was incredibly bright; she went on to become a lawyer. But she would sometimes despair of our very academic friends and their ability to function in the world, describing them as "book smart but not street smart".
I think the GPT things are a much magnified version of that. For a long time, we got to use skill with text as a proxy for other skills. It was never perfect; we've always had bullshitters and frauds and the extremely glib. Heck, before I even hit puberty I read a lot of dirty joke books, so I could make people laugh with all sorts of jokes that I fundamentally did not understand.
LLMs have now absolutely wrecked that proxy. We've created the world's most advanced bullshitters, able to talk persuasively about things that they cannot do and do not and never will understand. There will be a period of chaos as we learn new ways to take the measure of people. But that's good, in that it's now much easier to see that those old measures were always flawed.
I think the GPT things are a much magnified version of that. For a long time, we got to use skill with text as a proxy for other skills. It was never perfect; we've always had bullshitters and frauds and the extremely glib. Heck, before I even hit puberty I read a lot of dirty joke books, so I could make people laugh with all sorts of jokes that I fundamentally did not understand.
LLMs have now absolutely wrecked that proxy. We've created the world's most advanced bullshitters, able to talk persuasively about things that they cannot do and do not and never will understand. There will be a period of chaos as we learn new ways to take the measure of people. But that's good, in that it's now much easier to see that those old measures were always flawed.