I guess I should finally write something about data engineering or building software in general, but I simply cannot stop interacting with generative models like ChatGPT or Midjourney and thinking about them. I keep coming up with more and more ridiculous prompts, only to be surprised by the results once again.
The implications of what is coming are disruptive in a spectacular way, for good and bad. Which jobs will survive? In what form? What new professions will emerge? How will this nascent technology develop and help us create an even slightly better world to live in?
Can we even realistically regulate their use?
(I think we can and we have to.)
The truth is, we don’t know what is going to happen. We know it is a huge wave, but we are limited to educated guesses about its direction and impact. The best we can do is to keep thinking about a world in which advanced generative AIs are ubiquitous. Where they continuously learn and talk to each other, improving themselves further. And then imagine our place in it.
We are merely at the beginning. The models that are currently at our disposal are already impressive in many ways, even if sometimes their output is nothing more than convincing-sounding nonsense. They will only become better, and fast, at what they do, especially when trained on large corpora of specialized knowledge.
