Great question!
Here are a few personal answers, based on my interactions with ChatGPT.
(While ChatGPT is imperfect in many ways, it’s improving fast enough to impact all these categories in the near future, if it hasn’t already.)
Education
Riffing on Dalton’s question, I’ll plug a couple different things into the template, and explain why I think they belong there.
“People used to believe that a great education was scarce and expensive, but ChatGPT broke that mental model, by giving each person infinite amounts of direct and personalized instruction on whichever subjects they chose.”
This goes beyond the work of Coursera, Khan Academy and YouTube videos (and I have learned a lot on all those platforms). That’s because ChatGPT is all conversation, no one-to-many broadcasting. That matters because individualized tutoring is a highly effective means of teaching someone. ChatGPT comes much closer to the back and forth discovery of individualized tutoring than those other software tools. It is expert advice on tap, and it engages our social mechanisms of reciprocity. Because this expert is telling me what I ask, I pay closer attention, and try to implement what I learn, leading to deliberate mastery of new subjects and skills.
Great Ideas
“People used to believe that product builders with market insights and great startup ideas were scarce and expensive, but ChatGPT broke that mental model, by giving semi-technical people with domain expertise infinite access to a senior programmer they could turn to for advice. Now, more people with ideas and relevant experience can learn how to build, iterate on and test those ideas.”
All of us are in lifelong behavioral loops that go from gathering information about our environment to making a decision to taking an action on that environment, infinitely. ChatGPT makes gathering many types of information faster, and many types of building easier, when you combine it with other tools like Replit. That means we can learn faster, and potentially learn utterly new things we previously couldn’t dream of.
I used to be a journalist, and a byword in the newsroom where I worked was that the scarcest things were good story ideas. That was the choke point. A lot of smart investors think that there are only 10-15 great startup ideas that emerge per year. They have the capital, it’s waiting, but they haven’t found the ideas that they want to back.
Advice
“People used to believe that great advice was scarce and expensive, but ChatGPT broke that mental model, by giving each person infinite amounts of direct and personalized attention.”
Good conversation itself is scarce. Which kinds of conversation partners are hard to find?
Good listeners: It is hard to find someone who will really listen to you and respond to what you said. ChatGPT won’t talk over you or make it “all about them.”
Experts: People with the expertise you need, who are willing to spend infinite amounts of time answering your specific questions, are scarce.
Some kinds of conversations don’t really have a market, so we can’t say they’re expensive. Friends, for example, are by far the best conversation partners. If they charge, they’re not friends… All they cost you is time.
But other conversations are both scarce and expensive. These include consultants, coaches and therapists. Setting aside how variable the quality of those conversations can be, and whether most people are capable of judging experts whom they hire precisely because they lack expertise, ChatGPT could break these conversations open, and give many more people access to new insights.
Why does ChatGPT accelerate learning?
Conversational AI gives hundreds of millions of people access to unlimited domain expertise, and a conversational agent willing to answer their questions.
Most learning is embedded in relationships. We learn because a parent or teacher asks us to. We learn to compete with our friends, classmates, siblings. And the more that relationship motivates us, the better we learn.
Some positive motivations are a) understanding why we should learn; b) enjoying the novelty of mastering just the right amount of new material; c) reciprocity - trying to return the favor to our parent or teacher who has taken the time to instruct and support. ChatGPT taps into that reciprocal circuit, because we can tap it to give unlimited amounts of attention.
That is important because most people on a learning journey have very specific questions as they progress. Their station on the road of mastery is not the same as others, and the way they articulate their understanding and their questions is best met by an instructor who can adopt their terms, and show them the next insight.
From conversational agents, people will gain insights and skills that make them polymaths and builders. As builders, they will have fewer dependencies (i.e. they won’t have to wait for the software engineers, illustrators or copywriters to deliver their work, because they will have internalized many of those skills.) By building, they will test more ideas, and by testing more ideas, they will arrive at better ones.
Who Cares Anyway?
From the narrow perspective of startups and venture capital, that is good, because there will be more capable small teams with good ideas to back.
From the broader perspective of society, that is also mostly good, because much of the shape of life around us is determined by the legacy constraints of “the way we’ve always done things.”
I say “mostly” because I think using ChatGPT is like being rich — it will allow people to realize their aspirations. ChatGPT users will show us who they are. Some will be grotesque, but many will use their new-found superpowers to be heroes.
I look forward to knowing more of them.