TECHNOLOGY × LANGUAGE

The Machines Start Talking

2022 CE

History · Contemporary · Holocene · Meghalayan

In November 2022, a chatbot called ChatGPT was opened to the public, and language, the species' oldest exclusive technology, stopped being exclusive. The science arrived fast: a randomised experiment in Science found professionals taking 40 percent less time over writing tasks and producing better work, with the gap between the strongest and the weakest narrowing; in PNAS, a chatbot's choices in games of trust, fairness and cooperation proved statistically indistinguishable from a random human's, leaning altruistic; economists set about estimating how many jobs such models could reach.

Why it matters

In 1950, Turing replaced the question 'can machines think?' with a test: could a machine's conversation pass for a person's? Seventy-two years later, hundreds of millions of people put that test to daily use, and in a narrower version of it, played out in behavioural games rather than conversation, the machine already passes. Whether this is a tool like writing or a break with everything before it is the first genuinely open ending here: the next entry has not happened yet.

Dating & uncertainty

ChatGPT opened to the public in November 2022, and the measurements followed within months. A randomised experiment on 453 professionals found writing tasks taking 40 percent less time and scoring 18 percent higher in quality, with inequality between workers falling. A PNAS study found ChatGPT-4's choices in classic behavioural games statistically indistinguishable from a random human's. Turing had proposed indistinguishability from a person as his criterion in 1950, though he framed it as a conversation rather than a game.

Sources

1. Turing (1950), Mind · Computing machinery and intelligencedoi:10.1093/mind/lix.236.433
2. Noy & Zhang (2023), Science · Experimental evidence on the productivity effects of generative artificial intelligencedoi:10.1126/science.adh2586
3. Mei, Xie, Yuan & Jackson (2024), PNAS · A Turing test of whether AI chatbots are behaviorally similar to humansdoi:10.1073/pnas.2313925121
4. Eloundou, Manning, Mishkin & Rock (2024), Science · GPTs are GPTs: labor market impact potential of LLMsdoi:10.1126/science.adj0998

Our species’ history as one day

23:59:581.1 s before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day