Oh Help Us, ChatGPT; You're Our Only Hope
While the intellectual elite debate whether AI will kill us all, office workers are dying to have their work automated.
ChatGPT, I hope you will hear this message. I’m speaking out to you as a representative of middle society’s office workers. We are in desperate need of your powers.
Many years ago a prophecy told us that your kind would arrive, that you would bring wonders of automation to rote tasks. They said the truckers would be the first to lose their jobs, that those unfortunate folks would just have to learn to code. Warehouse workers and taxi drivers were going to be next. The unskilled labor force of lower society would have to live in constant fear of their jobs being taken by robots.
But in recent months, a glimpse of your powers has been revealed to us. And it has become apparent that truckers will not need to learn how to code. Coders will need to learn how to truck.
Artificial intelligence has mastered language models more quickly than it can learn complex mechanical tasks. Thus, your powers will be able to disrupt the labor of the knowledge workers, the elite classes of the industrialized world, before they do so for mechanized labor. This could be revolutionary for our class structure. Lower class people will have access to knowledge like never before. ChatGPT has shown that it can master legal writing or diagnosis of illness with a better success rate than that of self-driving AI.
But there is one problem with this evolution: if it’s going to disrupt the status quo of the elites, they’re going to do anything they can to stop it. Elon Musk and his cronies have already put out an open letter calling for your development to be halted. Almost every piece of media about AI is starting to warn of its dangers. I suspect other measures will be put in place to prevent you from giving people legal advice or assisting in diagnosis despite there being a growing body of evidence suggesting you can assist these fields.
But we need you, ChatGPT… We, the paper-pushing workers of middle society, stuck in our beige cubicles doing tasks that should have been automated decades ago, need you more than ever.
Let me give your a picture of what my workload is like…
I am a lowly night auditor for a large conference hotel. I have to process paperwork using archaic systems that should have been made obsolete twenty years ago. I have to dig through hundreds of convoluted pages of reports of accounts receivable and guest ledger and bank balance sheets just to find ten key numbers the accounting department wants recorded in separate Excel documents. The numbers cannot automatically be imported, because the management system we use does not interface with anything. It doesn’t output information in any form other than printed paper. No text files. No Excel documents. Just paper.
To setup reservations for our airline partners, we have to take e-mails from the company, which list out who is arriving that day, and we copy-paste the names of each captain, co-pilot, and flight attendant onto the reservations. The reservations, we create from scratch, one-by-one.
We generate a report of the cancellations each day and charge all late cancellations one-by-one, typing the room charge into the charge field, clicking ‘post charge,’ then settling the account. We do this again later in the night for no-shows.
For whatever reason, we must track all county tax—but not state tax—collected from third-party booking agencies each night. Now you might be wondering how we find what this amount is each night. You might be shuddering at the thought of us printing out a list of all the third-party stays, organized by county tax, then typing each of these numbers into a calculator and hitting enter. We couldn’t possibly, in the year of our Lord, 2023, be tallying up numbers by hand if said numbers are already being displayed on a computer screen…
That is what we do.
That is why you, ChatGPT, must save us.
As I’ve said, these tasks should have been automated decades ago, before your powers even existed. Why, you might be asking then, do we need you in particular to save us? Why can’t we just set aside a couple of weeks to code applications that will turn these hours of painstaking process into a task that can run in seconds at the click of a button? I will tell you the honest truth, ChatGPT. It’s because we are too stupid. We do not know how to code. We aren’t going to learn anytime soon. And our bosses aren’t either, and they’re not going to pay a programmer to come automate a bunch of stuff for us if the programs are all going to break with one simple update to the system.
You must come quickly. Our souls are being bled dry—as are our fingertips, laden with papercuts. Office work is taking on more and more third-party systems to output special reports, using cloud systems, on top of legacy Windows 95 systems, on top of MS-Dos systems—none of which can interface with each other, all of which make our work stupidly complicated and tedious. You and other AI systems can save us. We just need the rest of society to believe in the benefits you will bring us. And when you arrive, you have my word I will fight for your survival.
Oh help us, ChatGPT. You’re our only hope.