Who Should Fear ChatGPT?

You have reason to fear ChatGPT if you have been living your life like a human robot. If you wake up, dress, eat, work, shop, converse, and sleep, day after day in monotonous succession without creating or inventing or discovering or learning or growing, then you are becoming like a robot, and you have reason to fear Chat GPT. The robots might replace you if you continue like this.

If you believe that the universe is made up of only matter, if you believe that human beings are only what we can see, hear, touch, taste, and smell, if you believe people are only as good as what they can produce, then you have reason to fear ChatGPT.  You have reason to fear because this means there's nothing particularly special about you. You can only hope to become a glorified robot, and ChatGPT can already do something better than most humans.

In case you haven't heard, ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence that takes words and patterns of human language and rearranges them to produce written material, essays, letters, poems, stories, etc. However, it does not create or invent. It merely rearranges what's been given to it after being prompted.

If humans are basically forces that rearrange pre-existing matter, then humans don't create things either. We merely rearrange them. We take wood and rearrange it to make a house. We take oil and burn it to make energy. 

It is as the writer of Ecclesiastics claimed, "What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun." (Ecc. 1:9 ESV)

However, if you believe that humans are more than just a collection of cells and impulses, that humans are intrinsically different than animals and robots, that humans can add something to the universe, that they are in fact creators, then ChatGPT is merely another invention of mankind like the automobile and the gramophone. It is making a great amount of fuss and noise. Some people will use it to break the law while others will use it to better the world. But ultimately, it is a technological invention and not a human. It can never replace a living, breathing, growing, learning, inventing, creating human.

Obviously, I'm of the later opinion. I believe that humans are more than matter and are capable of bringing new things into the world. I don't mean new elements into the periodic table but something else, something you cannot hear, touch, taste, smell, or see. Insight, you might call it. Increasing awareness. Revelation even. 

I believe that humans are the funnels through which new inventions and creations come into the world. I also believe that someone is pouring these new ideas into us. And if we live our lives disconnected from that source, without daily revelation or communion, as some might say, we should indeed fear ChatGPT. We should also fear living like robots, only able to recycle all that's already been said and done and thought.