Jiaming Zhu: Should Humans Feel Anxious about ChatGPT's Phenomenon-Level Popularity?

A laptop shows OpenAI conversing with ChatGPT in simplified Chinese. Credit: Vision China.

The introduction of ChatGPT has updated people's perceptions of the development of artificial intelligence and raised a number of questions: will it cause a higher unemployment rate? What are the possible risks? Will it be a friend or foe?

In the preface to the recently published book AIGC: The Age of Intelligent Creation, economist and Chairman of the Academic and Technical Committee of the Hengqin Institute of Digital Finance, Jiaming Zhu, describes this innovative digital transformation as "a paradigm shift in civilization comparable to the Neolithic."

In a recent interview with East Meets West, he talked about ChatGPT, saying that it is a friendly competition between humans and artificial intelligence, not forcing humans into a corner. The fear and anxiety about AI should not be overplayed, but rather the relationship between humans and AI should be seen as coexisting.

Dr. Jiaming Zhu is Professor of Economics, Chairman of the Academic and Technical Committee of Hengqin Digital Finance Institute, Guest Professor of Southern University of Science and Technology and other universities, and advisor of Zhuhai and other local governments. His representative works include A Brief Introduction to the Structure of National Economy, The Future Determines the Present: Blockchain, Digital Currency and Digital Economy, and The Meta-Universe and Digital Economy.

ChatGPT is currently the hottest topic related to AIGC. You mentioned that it is too early to discuss it as a threat to humanity, so what should we make of the emergence of this new technology?

AIGC (Artificial Intelligence Generated Content) is an essential and the correct direction of development chosen by AI after a long period of trial and error, and ChatGPT is a milestone in the development of AIGC. ChatGPT has gone beyond the scope of AI products, as it has directly led to integrating AI with modern economic activities, economic development models, and daily human life in all its aspects. It has fundamentally changed the traditional principles of economics. The so-called threat theory is still premature. It is imperative to face the range of new technologies triggered by AIGC and to think about how to understand, keep up with, and apply them to change existing industrial and sectoral models and achieve innovation.

Bill Gates believes that ChatGPT will be as important as the Internet and the development of the personal computer. Do you agree with this view, and what does ChatGPT mean for human evolution?

Looking at the history of technological development, Bill Gates’ judgment has considerable validity. Because AIGC technology is indeed the major revolution after the Internet and computer, artificial intelligence has brought the Internet into another new phase. In the future, the main body of the Internet, apart from humans themselves, will be, to a large extent, artificially intelligent products, especially an artificially intelligent human-led intelligent Internet.

The year 2022 is a critical year for AIGC, and the emergence of ChatGPT is a testament to the enormous potential of artificial intelligence. Many companies are already innovating in AIGC technology, accelerating the process and leading to an essential stage of AI that is "a direct human-machine dialogue, like a human-human dialogue." It is foreseeable that AIGC will gradually reach a climax in the next two to three years.

Some people worry that an application like ChatGPT will make humans less capable of thinking. Quite the contrary, it will force and compel humans to evolve the ability to think. Now that we have discovered what humans and AI can do, humans will have to think about what else they can do. When humans ask this question and confront it, they are making progress.

Cartoon: ChatGPT ignites the AI fire Credit: Vision China.

ChatGPT has also sparked many controversies, including risks of academic plagiarism, misuse of technology and security of public opinion, what do you think of these issues?

Any technological progress and technological revolution will generate corresponding risks, which will be addressed mainly through two aspects. On the one hand, a regulatory system should be established, and related legal constraints should be formed. There should not be a disconnect between technological progress and the evolution of government regulation and the legal system. Still, the legal and regulatory systems should be allowed to evolve with the times. On the other hand, many problems relating to technological revolutions and advances need to be solved ultimately through the processes and advances themselves. Some of the issues perceived will naturally disappear when technological progress reaches the next stage.

ChatGPT has once again generated discussion about the development of AI, causing some people to lose their jobs. Which sectors do you think are most vulnerable?

In the next two to three years, there will unlikely be widespread mass unemployment due to AI. Applications such as ChatGPT will not substantially threaten the overall job market. In the long term, the development of AI extends the scope and changes the pattern of human activity and will have a coexisting and mutually reinforcing historical phase with humans. It forces humans to evolve in two ways. Firstly, to move from the traditional creative activities of the past to more advanced creative activities, leaving the more terminal and low-end creative activities to AI. Secondly, a further combination of AI and robotics will occur, allowing robots to replace human manual labor on a larger scale and, to a greater extent, freeing humans from manual labor and improving the quality of life and work.

In the process, humans have to make better choices, as more entrepreneurs are needed to open up more new fields and industries to gradually complete the migration of humans from the pre-AI generation to the post-AI age.

Cartoon: As AIGC applications continue to heat up. What changes will they bring to ordinary people's lives? Credit: Vision China.

Globally, where does China stand on AI? Is China capable of achieving a leading position?

At this stage of artificial intelligence, it must be acknowledged that the gap between China and developed Western countries is still relatively large. OpenAI, the company that released ChatGPT this time, is almost alone in leading the way. A considerable number of companies will follow afterward, including Microsoft and Google. The West will set off a wave of AI industry chains with AIGC as the framework, and ChatGPT and similar products as the centerpiece.

Therefore, we have to make an all-around adjustment from the underlying technology to the bigger model of the application. It is not enough to catch up at an even pace, we must accelerate to shorten the distance, and acceleration requires coordination and a policy system. China should choose the "push-back model," which is to strengthen the application of AIGC technology and through the application achieve the ultimate promotion of the industrial development of supporting applications. From basic to applied research, China urgently needs to build an industrial policy system to catch up with AIGC.

At the same time, enterprises should increase their application efforts and expand their application space; researchers should be able to solve the problems of information symmetry and basic research; and the state should guide investors to turn the relevant capital investment into capital behavior with a sense of long-cycle awareness and an understanding of supporting the appropriate industries for 3 to 5 years or even longer investment. Suppose capital returns are pursued too early and too hastily. In that case, companies will likely have to adjust their direction and lose historical opportunites because they do not have sufficient capital support at the critical moment.

Looking at the development of new technologies in recent years, Western countries are ahead of China regarding the underlying technology. At the same time, we are probably a little better at the practical application of the technology - why is there such a difference?

An important reason for this difference is that we lack the talent for basic research. But, after all, China has a large market and a well-developed industrial system. China has considerable advantages and potential in technology development at the engineering level. Now we need to choose a right strategy and make full use of our strengths to compensate for our weaknesses in the development of AIGC.

The education system must also be reformed to shorten the maturing top-notch technological talent cycle. If we analyse the founding team of OpenAI, very few have completed the long process of so-called undergraduate, master’s, Ph.D., and post-doctoral degrees. The key to future talent is nurturing students' imagination, creativity, and explosive power- the passion, ability, stamina, and state of being physically and mentally engaged and breaking through something 24/7.

The Zhongguancun Venture Street International Talent Bazaar opens as one of the events of the Zhongguancun Creation Season in Beijing, October 2018. Credit: Yi Yuan.