We are undergoing a new technological revolution. The so-called “fourth phase” is featured by the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Big Data, which are usually inter-connected.

The amount of available data is speedly increasing, in such an exponential way. According to Statista, global data volume in 2025 will be about 181 zetabytes, which represents a 129.11% increase from 2021 year.

Regardless the positive outlook of technological developments by the extent that economical productivity and quality of life that may get boosted, there are undeniable concerns about privacy.

Government surveillance finds Big Data and Artificial Intelligence as a window of oportunities to exert social engineering over citizens and try to attempt a successful central planning project, of which the Chinese Communist Party is an interesting example.

Anyway, not all the emerging concerns of AI are related to the attacks against civil liberties. The start of current year lead to a lot of conversations about a special kind of chatbot.

In November 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a large language model (LLM) chatbot that can generate human-quality text, translate languages, write different kinds of creative content, and answer your questions in an informative way.

An LLM is a based on massive datasets with Deep Learning techniques (transformers). Those training models may get data from different datasources, outlets and books. That is an application of natural language processing.

Every technological challenge is disrupting. Nevertheless, in the case of AI generative chatbots, the excitement and the convulsion were somehow intense and higher.

The so-called “intelligent generation of content” was interesting for diferent kind of jobs. Students also thought about a new tool when doing their assignments and homeworks.

Task automation is on the rise. Main use cases regard the content creation according to specific patterns, the translation—which is still improvable for languages such as Nordic and Slavic ones, and the generation of code snippets.

So many people is starting to fear about a big destruction of jobs. Concerns were similar when e-mail and agrarian machines were invented and launched to the global market.

Nevertheless, the aforementioned claim is too far from reality. Innovation does not mean destruction. The fact that our way of working may change does not mean that we are going to be unable to work somewhere.

CNBC reports that ChatGPT could be used to automate tasks that are currently performed by humans, freeing up workers to focus on more complex and creative tasks. Besides, there will be a need of experts in those kinds of chatbots.

As a proof of that, AI prompt engineers are in high demand, as companies race to develop and deploy generative AI applications. In countries like the United States, they may earn between 100-400K USD per year.

Prompt engineering is about preparing the inputs that we have to submit to intelligent chatbots. It is not just about typing down one or two words which may lead to a “magical retrieval” of a resolution.

Prompts may be based on few observations or in a chain of initial reasoning. Sometimes the resolution is not achieved in the first output so that we need to elaborate a few more instructions.

It means that people are not deprived from logical and abstract capabilities with this new technology. Now they need to exploit their domain of natural language to instruct and help the program when requiring or searching for something.

They need to think about the way of reasoning and structuring the information. For example, if they want a financial report, they need to provide a context or some observations and restrictions about the currency, the interest rates, and local taxes.

Having said that, it might be said that reasoning skills are prone to be boosted and promoted. When automating some repetitive tasks, people are still in need of knowing how to explain the order, that is, preparing the prompted request.

When it comes to the defense of liberty, there are no reasons to find a demon enemy in generative AI. As much as blockchain paves the way for higher decentralization, generative AI paves the way for stronger minds.

Having stronger minds is not about having a high intellectual quotient. It is important to say that admirors of the road to serfdom are threatened when individuals have a lot of information and criteria. So, if we can be skilled thinkers, freedom prevails. Maybe that’s a God-given opportunity.