by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
As I’ve said before, users of OpenAI ChatGPT imbue it with all their hopes and dreams because it’s so new that they don’t really have anything to compare it to. One thing I’m seeing on Twitter is a lot of people having a lot of existential angst about how expensive ChatGPT is going to be in the future. Or, more specifically, half the people want to pay for it for better service and half the people fear it will be too expensive for them to use.
But while I suppose it’s possible we may have to pay for ChatGPT at some point in the future, I also think that it’s just as possible that the whole thing will go mainstream a lot sooner than you might think. There are a lot of elements to all of this I don’t know — like how long OpenAI can keep the service free given how expensive each request is — but to do think, in general the move will be towards more free chatbot services, not fewer.
And as I’ve mentioned before, that “conundrum of plenty” is something we’re just not prepared for. We automatically assume — much like we did with the Web back in the day — that something as novel and useful as ChatGPT will always be the plaything of the elite and wealthy.
I suppose that’s possible, but historical and technological determinism would suggest the exact opposite will happen, especially in the context of ChatGPT 4.0 coming out at some point while we’re in the midsts of a global recess in 2023. My fear is chatbot technology will be just good enough a lot and I mean A LOT of people’s jobs will become moot in the eyes of our capitalistic overlords.
But maybe I’m being paranoid.
It’s possible that my fears about a severe future shock between now and around 2025 are unfounded and even though we’re probably going to have a recession in 2023, there won’t be the massive economic shakeout because of our new chatbot overlords that I’m afraid of.
