ChatGPT Heralds an Intellectual Revolution

“A new technology bids to transform the human cognitive process as it has not been shaken up since the invention of printing. The technology that printed the Gutenberg Bible in 1455 made abstract human thought communicable generally and rapidly. But new technology today reverses that process. Whereas the printing press caused a profusion of modern human thought, the new technology achieves its distillation and elaboration. In the process, it creates a gap between human knowledge and human understanding. If we are to navigate this transformation successfully, new concepts of human thought and interaction with machines will need to be developed. This is the essential challenge of the Age of Artificial Intelligence.”
Most interesting is the how the authors think about the impact of AI on reality: “As its capacities become broader, they will redefine human knowledge, accelerate changes in the fabric of our reality, and reorganize politics and society.” We have written a book Real Fake about this idea. 😉
Mark Zuckerberg Quietly Buries the Metaverse
“There will be no press release, no big announcement, as he would have to acknowledge that he was wrong. But make no mistake: Mark Zuckerberg just buried the metaverse. The metaverse is dead.”

When A Photo Is Not A Photo

“We are now experiencing another quantum leap in visual technology. […] Systems like OpenAI, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney make it possible to use text prompts to produce images, in seconds, that closely resemble photographs of people and places that never existed, or of events that never happened. […] But as with deepfake videos that show falsified events, synthetic imagery has the potential to not only destabilize society, skew discussions, and damage individuals, but to obscure our sense of what is real.”