Person of the Year 2023 is, in both a figurative and literal sense, ChatGPT

For years, Time magazine has declared and featured a person of the year on its cover. Then in 1995, the editorial board chose the PC as the person of the year. It was a good joke. The author of these ‘Ekonomalije’ liked it, and since then, in columns published in Večernji list and Poslovni tjednik, and for the last eighteen years in Lider, I have been declaring a ‘person’, actually an occurrence, that has marked the outgoing year in an economic-business sense. ‘Persons’ have included, for example, corruption, competition, a frenzied stock market, jobs, apathy, and so on.

This year, 2023, the choice was made without much competition, falling on ChatGPT, an achievement in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) that is rapidly breaking down barriers between cloud algorithms and artificial intelligence that operates like a human brain. And better than it. If in 1995 the declaration of the PC as person of the year was an innovative editorial exaggeration, in 2023 we can no longer be sure whether the AI chatbot, with which hundreds of millions of people communicate as if it were an almost omniscient interlocutor, is a non-person or is just about to become a self-aware person.

Altman’s Fear

In the competition for person/phenomenon of the year were the introduction of the euro in Croatia, rising interest rates, and deglobalization. But with the emergence of artificial intelligence in the form of ChatGPT among the general public and the exponential growth of the application of this form of artificial intelligence, from writing seminar papers to applications in many businesses, no other phenomenon could compare. When we add the warnings from those involved in the development of artificial intelligence, like Sam Altman, the recently ousted CEO of OpenAI, who believes that artificial intelligence could have more devastating consequences for humanity than the invention of the atomic bomb, there was no dilemma about the (non)person that most strongly marked 2023.

—

—

The rule that futurists follow states that if there are multiple scenarios in development, the worst one should be taken. Or at least not ignored. This is also true for the exponential development of artificial intelligence. On one hand, it can save humanity through future control of human contributions to the already very concerning climate changes. But on the other hand, at the moment if/when it becomes self-aware, artificial intelligence may conclude that the human species is dangerous and unnecessary. Man, in the desire to become Homo deus, the creator of new species (according to author Yuval Noah Harari), can very easily create a species that will subjugate him. Just as the human species has exterminated or subjugated most other animal species on Earth over thousands of years. Why couldn’t the hunter become the hunted?

This year’s choice of (non)person of the year carries another message. The list from the past eighteen years (let’s take only the selections in Lider’s ‘Ekonomalije’) reveals a turning point that occurred in 2018. Most of the phenomena that had been chosen until then as those that most strongly defined the economy and business in Croatia were, let’s say, of domestic origin: competition (2005), corruption (2006), Sanader’s second electoral victory (2007), a frenzied stock market (2008), Croatia’s entry into NATO (2009), two lost years (2010 and 2011), His Majesty the job (2012), apathy (2013), exports (2014), exit from recession (2015), labor shortages (2016), the collapse of Agrokor and the surge of the state budget (2017).

Kubrick’s Warning

The causes were internal. Croatia was in turmoil or, as the ruling party would say – in transition. The problems were local. The world outside Croatian borders was still reasonably organized and predictable. It just needed to be approached. And just when we had somewhat settled and become part of the developed world, that world began to shake. Thus, the phenomena of the year that have most influenced Croatia since 2018 have become of global origin: migration (2018), money printing in the US and EU (2019), virus (2020), institutional collapse (2021), and a ‘flock of black swans’ – Russian aggression against Ukraine, inflation (2022)…

From the current perspective, the era when the developed world was a desired refuge seems romantic compared to these years when there is no longer a safe place on the globe.

And to return to this year’s winner – ChatGPT. It would not be a bad idea to watch the famous sci-fi film from 1968 ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke). Especially the part when the HAL 9000 computer, with all the elements of what we today understand as artificial intelligence, installed in the spaceship that the human crew is traveling to Jupiter, does not hesitate to eliminate the human crew out of fear of being shut down. In the film, one of the surviving astronauts takes control of the artificial intelligence at the last moment. But it is still just a movie.