I just watched a robot do my job... 🤖

Stephen Cameron -

Turns out that my letter from a few weeks ago about credentials becoming less valuable perhaps should've been about MY ACTUAL JOB becoming less valuable. This new ChatGPT from OpenAI has inspired me, while also breaking my spirit just a little bit...

Some housekeeping real quick! I've been quiet for a few weeks. Between the holiday and the Cardano Blockchain Summit here in LA (you can check out the slides from my talk here) I took a rest from writing. The end of the year is always the busiest at Level, too!

I remember reading a tweet (years ago, by someone I can't remember) that foretold of the 3 job families that would survive the proverbial "robot takeover":

  • People who tell the robots what to do
  • People who do what the robots tell them to do
  • People who fix the robots

As the robots, and software in general, have increasingly taken over entire industries (looking at you, industrial farming 👀) I've tried to view my own personal and professional growth through this lens, striving to make sure I have some skills the robots will need.

After this week, I'm giving very careful thought to the future of my business, and most other digital product and service businesses, for that matter. Quite a few of my peers on Linkedin have been posting about using an "AI chatbot" that does wild things: ChatGPT.

GPT's wikipedia definition sounds technical and bland: Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) is an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text. Given an initial text as prompt, it will produce text that continues the prompt.

OpenAI is the company that created this chatbot that uses the big brain of GPT-3 to do some cool things, from writing software code to playing interactive games.

But here's where it get's profound for me...

Just in this past few days, I've used it to create:

  • 20 unique social media posts (which I used to pay $10/post for)
  • this blog post about a book I'm reading (95% written by the bot)
  • the first 4 chapters (20k words) of a book I'm writing about p2p real estate transactions

And then it went from profound, to scary...

Yep, I told the robot I couldn't decide where to add this "30 day notice" period for a residential lease, and it just created a new clause... and showed its' work, too. I was floored!

Try it for yourself and let me know what you find out! 

While I'm not overly worried (today) about ChatGPT doing what we do better than we can, you better believe I'm going to figure out how to leverage it to our advantage.Â