The potential to use these tools to solve seemingly impossible problems - from human biology to fusion energy to climate change - is awe-inspiring. And it’s happening faster than most anyone anticipated. It’s why I call our Promethean era “The Age of Acceleration, Amplification and Democratization.” Never have more humans had access to more cheap tools that amplify their power at a steadily accelerating rate - while being diffused into the personal and working lives of more and more people all at once. That loop is being put into everything - from your car to your fridge to your smartphone to fighter jets - and it’s driving more and more processes every day. It is our ability to sense, digitise, process, learn, share and act, all increasingly with the help of AI. Only this Promethean moment is not driven by a single invention, like a printing press or a steam engine, but rather by a technology supercycle. We know the key Promethean eras of the last 600 years: the invention of the printing press, the scientific revolution, the agricultural revolution combined with the industrial revolution, the nuclear power revolution, personal computing and the internet and … now this moment. That is, how you create, how you compete, how you collaborate, how you work, how you learn, how you govern and, yes, how you cheat, commit crimes and fight wars. This is a Promethean moment we’ve entered - one of those moments in history when certain new tools, ways of thinking or energy sources are introduced that are such a departure and advance on what existed before that you can’t just change one thing, you have to change everything. We are about to be hit by such a tornado. The second thing that came to mind was a moment at the start of The Wizard of Oz - the tornado scene where everything and everyone are lifted into a swirling gyre, including Dorothy and Toto, and then swept away from mundane, black-and-white Kansas to the gleaming futuristic Land of Oz, where everything is in colour. Clarke that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” To observe an AI system - its software, microchips and connectivity - produce that level of originality in multiple languages in just seconds each time, well, the first thing that came to mind was the observation by science fiction writer Arthur C. ![]() And I realised Craig’s words were an understatement.įrom the origins of speech to the art of the quill. ![]() Large language modules like ChatGPT will steadily increase in their capabilities, Craig added, and take us “toward a form of artificial general intelligence,” delivering efficiencies in operations, ideas, discoveries and insights “that have never been attainable before across every domain.” It is qualitatively different - and it will be transformational.” I think that it represents mankind’s greatest invention to date. “You need to understand,” Craig warned me before he started his demo, “this is going to change everything about how we do everything. Craig was preparing to brief the board of my wife’s museum, Planet Word, of which he is a member, about the effect ChatGPT will have on words, language and innovation. Craig Mundie, the former chief research and strategy officer for Microsoft, was giving me a demonstration of GPT-4, the most advanced version of the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI and launched in November. I had a most remarkable but unsettling experience last week.
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