Digital opium

More timely than ever to quote the beloved Jorge Luis Borges: "The future is not what is going to happen, but what we are going to do." And it is because the future becomes blurred, at least from the perspective of the insertion of technology in everyday life and the unconcealable absence of controls.

The star of the moment, without hesitation is ChatGPT, a conversational bot that allows you to perform any task or written work, that an Artificial Intelligence (AI) engine can maintain coherent and fluid talks and even help desperate students pass their exams and practical work is a reality.

We still do not know the limits of AI and ChatGPT, but we could assume, from what we have seen so far, that this technology would have the ability to infer the thoughts and desires of other people and take advantage of it to interpret and predict their behaviors.

Our surveys indicate that 10% of students may cheat by asking the tool to write their assignments, but with a "nice" and "dangerous" addition at the same time: write it as a 14-year-old would and include spelling mistakes.

If there is something that characterizes the human being is his imaginative capacity, so necessary to think about the future. We must ask ourselves how to manage and control the use of this type of technology, since not only will situations be repeated, but they will become a constant.

The Paperpal application rewrites texts in a more academic way, with a format typical of a university of global prestige; Plagiarism Remover is another frequently used to validate and ensure that the text of a piece of writing is not the same as some of the phrases used in the source bibliography.

Another example: Quillbot, could be used to avoid it being obvious that you copied a text from ChatGPT, since it allows you to paraphrase everything that was generated and rewrite it in a different way, in such a way that no platform will be able to identify what was done with the app.

In these cases it is only applications oriented to conversational utilities, but there are dozens of others thought and designed for the rest of the levels of our professional and personal life.

The present and future regarding how to use these tools are unknown. This is the society that never tires of consuming entertainment, that feeds on tons of unverified information – probably erroneous – and all kinds of games; all in its most brutal formats. Fake news and misinformation are already undeniable but difficult to identify and the game, all games, increasingly addictive, at hand and closer.

Social networks are the mirror of how we live: superficiality and tantrums everywhere. Fiction based on "filters" and a new format of life related to the "digital opium", the law of minimum effort and maximum benefit and "I only do what I like, but nothing", therefore, anxiety and dissatisfaction, which at the end of the journey, are common currency.

Scheduling a virtual meeting with four other people, and not being able to participate for reasons of force majeure, will involve asking a virtual assistant to participate for us, recording the session, generating a text summary and then preparing a presentation with bar graphs!

Who has not participated in a conversation that invites you to mine Crypto? "I invested in Bitcoin, no need to work." This society postulates to be at the forefront of these proposals with deep contradictions when the questions regarding the ecological conflict are evident, because mining is only possible by consuming an enormous flow of electrical energy, which in the vast majority of cases is still generated by fossil fuels.

The calculations necessary to "produce" cryptocurrencies demand enormous amounts of energy and many of us wonder what is the meaning of tremendous infrastructure and carbon emission so that after 160 quintillion calculations per second, that is, 160,000,000,000,000,000,000,<>, a cryptocurrency is generated?

Moreover, according to the point of view, they are not really doing any useful work, they are just calculations that serve no other purpose, which are immediately discarded and the cycle begins again, generating a digital record of a hypothetical value. In fact, Bitcoin uses more energy than all of Argentina. What's more, if BTC were a country, it would be among the 30 that consume the most energy.

Put a machine to work for us, that does homework or academics, that your job interview is in charge of a bot, that tells you which street to take when you drive, that assists you to order a taxi, that your daily memorization exercise is delegated to Google and your smartphone; They seem to be inalienable customs that society accepts and adopts and that could, in the future, compromise our cognitive or discernment capacity.

I could not otherwise close this negative and drunken look, which actually tries to be reflective, summoning again the great Borges, "Doubt is one of the names of intelligence". This new form of intelligence and technological dependence do not seem to have or generate doubts, we will see if it has a future.

Gabriel Zurdo is CEO of BTR Consulting, a specialist in technological and business risk