The big news for 2023 in the Uruguayan education system is the reform announced by the National Public Education Administration (ANEP). The initiative aims to better equip students for the changing world of the 21st century. The changes will include structural and content-related reforms, as well as teacher education and training initiatives. A major focus will be digital education, including the use of new technologies in the classroom and training teachers in their effective use. It is seen as a significant step towards improving the quality of the country's education system. Although there is still a long way to go, this initiative represents an important move in the right direction for the betterment of education in Uruguay.
Everything might suggest that I went to the effort of informing myself about the reform and drafting a summary of its objectives. But that's not the case; I didn't make any effort. This text was written autonomously by ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence program developed by OpenAI. ChatGPT is capable of answering complex queries based on content available on the web. The texts written by ChatGPT are generally indistinguishable from those written by humans.
Since its launch in November 2022, ChatGPT has generated extraordinary interest, with over 100 million users in just two months. It took TikTok 9 months and Instagram more than two years to reach the 100 million user mark. ChatGPT is attracting this huge interest because of its usefulness and the long-standing fascination with machines that seemingly behave like humans. From HAL 9000, the “intelligent” computer co-star of the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, to Roy Batty, the killer robot replicant in the 1982 cult film Blade Runner, our fear of so-called intelligent machines has been expressed in art.
ChatGPT has certain issues that users need to be aware of. For one thing, it suffers from “hallucinations” (a technical term used in the field of AI), which can lead it to produce inaccurate answers. Another problem is that AI can sometimes deviate from its expected behavior and offer advice or opinions that are unwanted. For example, after a long question-and-answer session on technical issues, the program advised specialist journalist Kevin Roose to leave his wife. It's frightening to think about how a machine that can generate such destructive advice might be able to influence the behavior of an immature, impressionable, or disturbed person.
The main fear surrounding AI is that it will replace us in our jobs. Human skills have tended to be replaced or enhanced by each wave of technological change. Human muscle power was devalued by machines, speed by motor vehicles, mental arithmetic by calculators or spreadsheets, memorisation by databases, and indexing and archiving by search engines. ChatGPT possesses a skill that until now was unique to humans: the ability to write.
Of course, humans will continue to have an advantage in literary writing, where creativity, experience, and emotion are crucial, or in opinion pieces involving personal convictions and moral choices that cannot be computed. However, the output of routine content (software, newspaper articles, social media posts, legal opinions, sales messages, advertising brochures, technical manuals, and more) is likely to be automated by bots such as ChatGPT. This has caused ripples of fear among people who previously believed that machines could never write like humans (programmers, journalists, advertisers, lawyers, political analysts, and so on).
Whether at an individual level or within certain trades (let’s not forget lift operators, for example), such apprehension is well-founded. But on a societal level, this fear is historically misguided. Major technological changes have always wiped some jobs, but they have also created many more, often in new trades and professions.
However, this does not mean that there are no groups of people adversely affected, especially in the short term. Technological change is constantly redefining the comparative advantages of humans and machines. If technology makes it possible to automate a task, then humans will need to find other tasks where we can be more productive than machines. But people need to be retrained to take on these new roles. The real threat to our work is not an excess of technology, but a lack of knowledge. Overall, there is a lack of capacity and motivation on the part of companies to continuously reskill their employees. Employees largely lack the time and resources to acquire the new skills needed to compete for new jobs.
As a result, the market will not provide the necessary reskilling on the scale and speed required. The solution is not to impose barriers to technological change (such as the absurd “robot tax”), but to implement permanent reskilling schemes that are accessible to the population at large. This is a key social security issue that should be better reflected in the pension reform package currently being debated by Uruguayans.