All I wanted to do
was fix my email. I did not expect to have
a minor existential crisis about how much the world
might be about to change. Normally this is the sort of talk
that Iād have given on stage at some conference about
the future of the web, but, um, Iām in
New Zealand right now, and I also have this vague suspicion
that those conferences might not be relevant
for too much longer. I was lucky enough to live through
the mass adoption of the internet. For anyone younger than
about 25 watching this, you wonāt remember just how fast and how incredible
that transformation was. And I was on the
cutting edge of it, I was living it, I was one of the people who
understood what was going on. Useful new technologies generally
follow a sigmoid curve. You have a slow takeoff as the
technology is invented and the major pain points
get sorted out, and then you have this
incredible explosion of growth as people find it useful and the technology gets better
and better and better and better, and loads of competitors
enter the market, and people find more and more
and more and more real-world, practical
uses for it. And thereās this massive race
to make newer, better, bigger things that people keep making
more stuff with. And then you reach the limit of whatās
possible with that technology, and the rate of progress
flattens out again. Basically, thereās a reason
very few people camp outside Apple Stores
for the new iPhone any more. I remember Napster from back in 1999. And in hindsight, I think Napster
was the first big sign of just how many industries
were going to be changed or completely destroyed
by the internet. Not just the music industry, but travel agents, video rental stores,
encyclopaedias, shopping malls, big-box stores, the postal service,
journalism, the entire media industry. Napster wasnāt the first sign,
but it was the first major one that millions of non-technical
people were using by choice. The first one to get big mass-media
attention and legal problems. It was the first big
popular disruption, the first warning shot, the first rumble of thunder
off in the distance that said the storm was approaching,
that everything was about to change. I donāt think many people realised
that at the time. And even if they did,
they couldnāt have predicted the world that would follow.
The world I grew up in, the world that Iāve got
really comfortable with, the world of the web, of
social media, of smartphones. This video youāre watching now
is a very early-2023 video, and a very English-speaking one. This is a record of a point
in time and space. And I might be wrong about this, I donāt know where technologyās
going to go from here. But: I think that world,
my world, the one I grew up in, is about to change radically. I think weāre on a new sigmoid curve, and I have no idea how far along
that curve we are right now. And I donāt know if I want
to change with itā¦ but I think Iāll have to. And all I was trying to do
was fix my email. This is a really specific problem,
but it really annoyed me, and I have to explain it for
the rest of this to make sense, so bear with me. Almost every email system
has the idea of folders. You have one copy of an email,
and once youāre done with it, you file it in a folder like a piece of paper
in a filing cabinet, because thatās the mid-20th-century
physical analogy that the inventors went with. But. In 2004,
Google launched Gmail, which threw all that out
in favour of labels. Email is just in one big pile,
you search to find stuff, and you add labels
to help you sort it. I hate labels, because
I like the analogy of folders, thatās what I started out with,
thatās what I was already using. I didnāt want to change for no reason. But everything else about Gmail
was so much better than any of the alternatives
at the time that I moved over to it
a couple of years later. And I decided, fine, I will
just treat labels like folders, Iāll change my workflow
as little as possible. Each thread gets one label. Thatās like putting
it into a folder? Which meant that when I backed up
my emails, which I do, never trust having only
one copy of something, particularly if that copyās
up in the cloud, but when I did that,
I could use a regular old-school
desktop email program like Microsoft Outlook
to make that backup. You can use programs
like that with Gmail accounts, they talk to each other. If they didnāt, stuff like the
default Mail app on iPhones wouldnāt work,
and people would complain. But those old-school systems
donāt understand labels, so Gmail just lies and
says theyāre folders. Great! That means my
email program can talk to Gmail, and request
a copy of all those messages, one āfolderā at a time, and then I know itās
backed up every message. Theyāre even stored in
actual email folders, like I wanted! It took fifteen years
for me to notice: that wasnāt working properly. I was doing a routine backup last month, and I noticed that a thread
in that email backup was missing several
recent messages. And that made me suspicious, the kind of discomfort that you get
when you know something is wrong, but you donāt know what it is yet. So I looked a little bit further, and I realised loads of messages
were missing in my backup. More than a hundred thousand
of them, over fifteen years. They were still there in Gmail,
on the web. They hadnāt been lost. Itās just they hadnāt been backed up. And thatās because, it turns out, in Gmail, labels only attach to
individual messages and not the full thread. That is invisible to most people. Itās barely mentioned
in the documentation. And itās a really subtle,
annoying distinction. If you send an email,
put a label on that thread, get a reply, and then
just hit āArchiveā: that reply doesnāt get the label. And as you go back and forth,
and add to that thread, none of the other messages there
get a label unless you explicitly
untag and retag the whole thread. Which means more than 100,000
unlabelled messages werenāt in my backup. Is this a really specific, nerdy problem
that only Iām annoyed about? Yes. Absolutely. Iām one of the very
few people in the world that itās going to affect. Loads of people donāt sort or label
their emails at all, and most donāt back them up. But I needed to fix this,
I needed my backup to work, and I did not want to
change my damn workflow. But how on earth do I fix
every email thread over fifteen years, without painstakingly clicking
through all of them? I grew up fixing things with code, so obviously,
thatās where my brain went. Google has a service
called Apps Script. It means that anyone
can write simple code to easily change and
automate things in Gmail, Calendar, Docs, YouTube,
whatever. Itās a brilliant service,
Iāve no idea how it ever got made! And it will inevitably, one day,
be shut down with very little warning, because thatās just what Google does. But Apps Script meant
that to fix this problem, I could just spend an hour or so
writing a bit of code. And itās been a while
since Iāve done that! First thing I do when Iām coding
something thatās simple like that, is I write out what itās meant to do
in plain English. Just the flow of logic,
so I can then use that as a guide. So I wrote it,
and then I thought, hang on, isnāt there an AI thing
thatās meant to do this now? Yes, this is a video
partly about ChatGPT, but I promise Iām not going
to go into the details there. Telling someone about your
fascinating AI conversation is like telling someone
about your dreams. They donāt care, it just sounds
like youāre hallucinating nonsense. But Iād seen posts from people
being freaked out about how good ChatGPT is and,
intellectually, yeah, I looked at it
and I agreed with them. It seemed surprisingly good. But it is just a text transformer. All it does is guess what the
next word in the phrase is. I knew that weād been seeing
some improvements in that lately. I made a video two years ago about āthe sentences computers canāt
understand, but humans canā, and at the end of that video, I made a joke about how computers
with language skills are ten years away, just as they have been
for the last 40 years. I was wrong. Turns out thatās pretty much solved now. But ChatGPT is still just a thing
that predicts what the next word is going to be. It produces generic, milquetoast output thatās confidently wrong
about a lot of things. Itās going to help spammers
and maybe have a little bit of real-world use.
Right? But I thought, okay,
letās put my text description in, tell it to translate to this
obscure Google Apps Script, see what it does. ā¦and it wrote the code for me. In a few seconds. And I felt this pit-of-the-stomach,
existential horror, and at that moment,
I couldnāt explain why: but I figured it out later. Itās just predicting
the next word. The code it gave back was
a bit wrong, but frankly, my first attempt wouldāve
been a bit wrong. So I asked it in plain English to fix a couple of the
errors that Iād spotted, and it did, and that version
was nearly right. Not quite, though.
It used a really strange approach. I tried to work out
why it had done that, and then I realised,
I could just ask. And it told me, in English,
why it had done that. And it had made the same mistake
I did with my backup. Because, turns out,
Googleās documentation is wrong, Google Apps Script itself treats labels
as attaching to threads not messages. Google wrote their own
programming language wrong! So I told ChatGPT about the error.
And it fixed the script. It bodged its way around Googleās
bad documentation to build the thing I was
actually asking for. And after all the
back-and-forths, I didnāt actually
save much time! But it was so much easier. I never had to
pore through documentation to find the exact specific
magical incantation that I needed. Also, my coding skills are
years out of date. Thatās one of the reasons I donāt
make computer science videos any more. The last time I learned a new thing
in code was probably 2015. My old skills were good enough.
I didnāt want to change my workflow. Iām not sure if ChatGPT is a
better coder than I am, but it felt about equal. It felt like watching
while someone wrote code, with me occasionally
chiming in and going, āum, I think you might have
made a mistake there?ā And sometimes, I was the one
who made the mistake. At one point, I realised Iād written the wrong thing in
that first text description, ChatGPT had just been following
my wrong instructions. I know itās just a text model that
predicts what word comes next, but it didnāt feel like it.
So at first, I thought that pit-of-the-stomach
existential-dread feeling was because my brain
had gone āthatās a humanā, or āthatās an alien intelligenceā. Or because I was
starting to think, well, what if my brain is just
a transformer system thatās trying to predict
what the next word is? Iām sure I remember some
old pop-science article about how your brainās
a prediction engine and āsurpriseā is just a fancy word
for ābeing wrong about what comes nextā. But then the next day I gave
ChatGPT a more difficult problem, one that required not just
translating English to code, but actually a bit of
a logical leap, and it just confidently, completely
failed in multiple, obvious ways. And that meant that I wasnāt worried
about it coming for my job. Not yet, anyway. Sure, no-oneās asked for that
exact problem to be solved before, the one about the labels and messages. ChatGPT wasnāt just copying
and pasting from somewhere, there was arguably creativity involved. But, if Iām honest, a lot of the
programming I used to do was just copying and pasting
bits from somewhere. At some point, every modern programmer
searched on Google or Stack Overflow and āadaptedā something
that someone else wrote. Itās basically part of
the job at this point. Iām deliberately avoiding
the argument about creativity, AI art, and copyright,
by the way. I donāt know how
I feel about it, and I donāt know how
the courts will resolve it. If I hired a human
artist or musician to create a painting or song
in a more famous artistās style, that would be weirdā¦
but it would be legal. As long as theyāre not pretending
to be the famous artist, as long as the smaller artist is not
trading on their name, thatās fine. The style of most of my videos
on this channel is just a slightly faster version of
the TV shows I watched growing up. Thatās what this intelligence was trained on. And this video is basically in the style
of every other video essayist on YouTube. Itās just I tend to go to the beach
a bit more often. [seagull screaming] If someone set up an AI to
generate YouTube videos, or even YouTube educational videos
as a genre, I think Iād be fine with that? I donāt think Iād have a problem
with my work being a small part of a massive pool
of training data. But if someone started ripping off
specifically my name and my work? Yeah, I can see why artists
are furious about that. The British legal term for it
is āpassing offā. Iāve said before: please donāt train models
on what I make. Or, frankly, on anyone specific
without their consent? But okay, I wasnāt worried
about being replaced, and I wasnāt worried that
I was actually talking to some human-equivalent
alien artificial intelligence. So why did I still have
that feeling of dread? Artificial intelligence,
text transformers and diffusion models, everything that weāre
currently seeing, seems to be on that
sigmoid curve of progress. And I donāt know what point
on that curve weāve got to. If weāre already most of the
way up that curve, then cool. Programmers and artists
have brand new tools, but they canāt create something
at a human level with them. Itās not going to
take many jobs. Itās gonna make peopleās
work more efficient, the same way that loads
of inventions, like Photoshop,
have done before. If weāre at the middle of
that curve, then wow, weāre gonna get some really
impressive new tools very soon, that still need some
humans to work them. Maybe Siri and the Google Assistant are going to become the things
hey were always promised to be. But that feeling of dread came
from the idea that ChatGPT, and the new AI art systems, might be to my world what Napster
was to the late nineties. The herald, the first big warning that this new technology, the thing that
was going to change everything, was starting to actually
change everything. Where huge numbers of people,
not just the nerds, were actively using it. And it didnāt matter that Napster
got sued out of existence, because by then there was Morpheus
and Grokster and LimeWire and KaZaA. And then there was Spotify. The old business model, that idea
that you bought a copy of music, had been struck a mortal blow
and no-one noticed it for a while. If you hear echoes of the Napster case
in the lawsuits against AI art programsā¦ so do I. I was getting a haircut
the other week, and unprompted, the barber started
talking about ChatGPT, and how heād actually used it
to write a formal email that he couldnāt be bothered
to put together himself. He wasnāt a particularly
technical person, he wasnāt a nerd like me,
but heād used it easily, the same way that someone who wanted
to get a load of music for free would figure out Napster. Itās not about ChatGPT,
not specifically. Itās about what it represents. Because if weāre still at the
start of the curve for AI, if weāre at the Napster point, then everything is about to change, just as fast and just as strangely
as it did in the early 2000s, perhaps beyond all recognitionā¦ and this time Iām
on the wrong end of it. Iām like the music executive,
back in ā99. It feels, to me, like something
might have just gone very wrong for the now-comfortable world
that I grew up with and that Iāve settled down in. Thatās where the dread came from. The worry that suddenly
I donāt know what comes next. No-one does. Iāve been complaining for years
that it feels like nothing has really changed
since smartphones came alongā¦ and I think that maybe,
maybe, I should have been careful
what I wished for. At some point, Iāll look back
on this video and, with hindsight, I will easily be able to see
where we were on the curve. We all will. Part of me hopes that
I am entirely wrong, that in a few years Iāll
still be working like this. The email thing is
a metaphor, of course, it wonāt be email
folders for you. It might be something else,
something youāre attached to. Maybe something minor, or maybe the whole
industry you work in. But right now, that feeling,
that creeping horror, that dread: it turns out that was the worry that after years of being
fairly steady and comfortable, my world is about to changeā¦
and despite everything, I will still want my email
to be in folders. ā¦and now, an AI-generated NordVPN ad! Today I want to talk about one
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click the link in the description. I am going to be out of a job soon.
As usual, the man put it in words better than I ever could. AI is utterly fascinating, and yet I can't help but feel a bit uneasy about the progress that's being made currently. This isn't going to go away, this is going to become huge. And I'm not sure whether it's in a good or bad way.
I work in technology and have had a healthy skepticism about messianic-sounding trends like blockchain, augmented reality, internet of things. They're fun, but put on wait-and-see watchlist. OpenAI and ChatGPT feel very different to me, and like Tom, I have a hair-on-my-neck sense of impending sea change.
Growing up you would always hear older people talking about how much the world has changed since they were a kid and you think "It can't be that much different" but then seeing how much the world has changed and continues to change since I was a kid is both astounding and a little terrifying looking forward. The technological advances that are made seem to just keep getting crazier and crazier like an avalanche that doesn't end. I can't even imagine what the world will look like in another 10-20 years and AI is probably going to be one of the biggest factors in that which is what makes it so scary.
We've already seen how gullible some people can be when it comes to fun, politically-aligned conspiracies.
I can easily imagine AI and search engine algorithms working together to create a "parallel universe" of bespoke content designed to psychologically kite certain people towards certain viewpoints.
I mean, people didn't need evidence to believe Obama was born in Kenya. They just went along with it. Now imagine AIs feeling certain blogs, forums, and social media feeds with hyperealistic memes, video, and audio. There will be fact-checking certainly, but will it happen quick enough? Or will certain people care?
I think saying Morpheus, Grokster, Limewire, and Kazaa in that order was a nod to Weird Al's "don't download this song" but I can't prove it.
Online interactions are about to become meaningless, you'll never be able to know what you're talking to.
We're outsourcing humanity in a way that terrifies me.
"I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
Anything that is in the world when youāre born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
Anything that's invented between when youāre fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."
āDouglas Adams
Man I hate gmail's tags as well. All I want is an option to make it so an email can only have 1 tag assigned to it. It's basically impossible to properly categorize all the emails I get, and incredibly frustrating when an email keeps showing up all over the place. I've got filter rules so long they span multiple lines just trying to make it so that 1 email from a specific domain only shows up under that one tag, and only one tag.
or at least let order my rules by priority and have an option that 'removes all other tags' before applying a new tag. It's just so dumb...
If AI is indeed at the bottom of the curve, the world is going to change to a degree that I feel no one can know.
If youāve been around recently thereās been a really convincing voice AI floating around, couple that with chat gpt to impersonate someone. You are talking fraud out the ass and people being friends or lovers with AI that simulates a celebrityās personality. Along with deepfakes you could have you celebrity crush as your partner in every way but physical.