Will ChatGPT Soon Control Reality?

By Michael Ashley and Robert Edward Grant

Monica and Kim had been looking forward to this road trip for weeks. With college finally in their rearview mirror, they had reached adulthood. A software company had recruited Monica to come on as a lead developer with a six-figure starting salary. And Kim would begin med school in the fall.

“This is like our last hurrah,” she said, closing the trunk with all their bags inside.

“Best route to the Grand Canyon?” Monica asked Rover, her AIChatbot.

“Routing,” the male voice pumped through the car’s speakers. 

As the car powered up, she and Kim fell back into their comfy passenger seats. Like every other self-driving car, theirs came without a steering wheel. 

“Wanna catch up on some sleep this first leg?” Monica asked.

“Read my mind.”

Picking up her phone, Kim appealed to her own friendly AIChatbot. “Nonny, shut the windshield, please.”

Their circular sunroof window with a 360-degree panoramic view shuttered close—not unlike the batmobile locking up, Monica thought. 

“Nonny, play sleeping binaural beats,” Kim said next. Soothing sounds pumped into her earbud implants.

Monica didn’t need such help. She was out the moment her head hit the pillow she’d brought along. 

They woke up somewhere remote and bright.

“When’d the window go back open?” said Monica sleepily.

“Don’t know.” Kim fiddled with the console. “You remember to charge us last night?”

“I thought you did!”

Monica and Kim had the same terrifying thought. The car was dead. 

Worse, they were in the middle of nowhere. Arizona if they had to guess from the red rocks around them. Lonely cacti scattered in the barren hills.

 Worse yet, it was heating up in here from the hot sun in a cloudless sky.

“You got a signal?” asked Monica.

“No. You?” Kim stared at her useless phone.

Monica opened the door to a blast of heat that stole her breath. It was easily over 100 degrees outside. You could fry an egg on the pavement.

Kim cupped her hand over her eyes. Sweat pooled on her forehead.

There was no other car in sight. No buildings or any civilization signs. 

Then it hit her. They’d brought lots of chips and candy bars. 

But no water. 

“You know where we are?” Kim tried to keep panic out of her voice.

“Not without a signal,” said Monica.

“Can we call anyone?” 

“Not without a signal,” said Monica.

“What’ll we do?”

Monica thought back to the many times she’d turned to her phone for answers. Instinctively, she pulled it out. “Rover, where are we?”

“Without a signal, it’s impossible for me to say,” said the AIChatbot.

Kim turned to her phone. “Nonny, we’re stranded with no water and no power. What do we do?”

Kim watched helplessly as the wheel on her phone cycled around. And around. Then, Monica uttered just what she was thinking too, making her nightmare all the more real. 

“If no one passes this way, we’re goners.”

---

OpenAI launched ChatGPT on November 30, 2022. Primarily bankrolled by Microsoft, ChatGPT is a natural language processing tool enabling users to have more human conversations. 

Think: Captain Kirk asking his ship’s computer questions on Star Trek.

By December, students were using ChatGPT to do their homework. "holyyyy, solved my computer networks assignment using chatGPT," one young man tweeted. That same month, the Los Angeles Unified School District blocked the site “to protect academic honesty.” 

New York City’s Department of Education soon followed suit. "While the tool may be able to provide quick and easy answers to questions, it does not build critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, which are essential for academic and lifelong success, said department spokesperson Jenna Lyle.

By January, ChatGPT had passed the Wharton business final exam for the school’s Master of Business Administration (MBA program). It had also sailed through the U.S. Medical Licensing Exam, and the University of Minnesota Law School’s exams.

ChatGPT is such a disruption threatening to undermine education and how we learn that even students are crying foul. NPR reports that 22-year-old Princeton senior Edward Tian is developing an app to “combat misuse.” 

This news comes upon Stephen Marche’s warning in The Atlantic. In a piece called “The College Essay is Dead,” he writes, “The essay, in particular the undergraduate essay, has been the center of humanistic pedagogy for generations. It is the way we teach children how to research, think, and write. That entire tradition is about to be disrupted from the ground up."

Returning to Monica and Kim, it’s not so absurd to suggest ChatGPT may soon displace the calculator as humanity’s primary mental crutch. Not long ago, we expected students to do math in their heads. 

No more. Nowadays, adults and children alike turn to machines to do such thinking for us. And we’re the worse for it.

Here's another corollary. 

Before every phone came equipped with GPS, taxi drivers had to rely on their brains for directions. London cabbies once had enlarged hippocampi—literally bigger brains—to figure out on their own where they were going.

No more. 

Today’s Uber drivers, many of whom replaced cabbies, plug in addresses to their phones to find their way. They could have no clue where anything is in their city—and still thrive as a driver. 

Now what will happen if we continue outsourcing our thinking? 

In our fictional story, Kim and Monica automatically rely on tech for all their daily needs. Naïve, it never occurs to them that without such aids, they are entirely at nature’s mercy. They are on their own.

This is the brave new world we’re handing to our kids.

But the problem with ChatGPT goes deeper. 

Another issue concerns centralization of knowledge. “History is the stories we tell about the past,” author Thomas King once said. 

And who controls such stories? It used to be our historians and other academics whose writings would appear in encyclopedias.

We don’t use these much anymore.

Instead, we turn to Wikipedia, believing what we read online. Yet in the chapter titled “Monopoly of Truth” in our new book Neuromined: Triumphing over Technological Tyranny (Fast Company Press 2023), we expose Wikipedia’s bias. Entries are not edited by dispassionate parties. Instead, a centralized group of individuals control and can affect content—dictating reality.

Now, enter ChatGPT and we got a big problem on our hands.

Star Trek shows us how easy it is for humans to ask computers questions—and trust the answers. Now imagine a future where students and adults alike “understand” reality based on the narrative ChatGPT feeds us. ChatGPT determines what’s real or not, what’s right or wrong.

Think that’s far-fetched? 

As MSN reports, ChatGPT is politically biased. Consult the article and you will see the app sides with Joe Biden over Donald Trump. When asked about the former’s mistakes as president, it gives a pithy, non-committal answer. When asked about Trump’s mistakes, it delivers a long litany.

At the Sovereignty Assembly, we subscribe to neither political affiliation. Instead, we view technofascism as both a left/right issue. Our concern is when any tech tool amasses undue centralized power. 

Not only does ChatGPT undermine humans by eroding our mental self-reliance, but it also distorts reality by promoting one political view over another, unduly shaping how we view life.

The good news is that by reading this you are participating in the resistance. “Knowledge is power” goes the saying. Truer words were never spoken concerning ChatGPT. Simply knowing this app’s bias and its propensity to undermine our natural faculties enables us to make informed choices.

Yes, AI is a powerful tool with wonderful implications to be harnessed. But it remains one of many tools. 

As humans, we are endowed with not just consciousness but discernment. This means we can decide what we outsource to the machine and what we do on our own. Here’s to the wisdom ChatGPT is already giving us. 

Unwittingly, it’s shown the need to think for ourselves.