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Promises and Pitfalls of Technology

Politics and privacy, private-sector influence and big tech, state competition and conflict, author biography, how is technology changing the world, and how should the world change technology.

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Josephine Wolff; How Is Technology Changing the World, and How Should the World Change Technology?. Global Perspectives 1 February 2021; 2 (1): 27353. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/gp.2021.27353

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Technologies are becoming increasingly complicated and increasingly interconnected. Cars, airplanes, medical devices, financial transactions, and electricity systems all rely on more computer software than they ever have before, making them seem both harder to understand and, in some cases, harder to control. Government and corporate surveillance of individuals and information processing relies largely on digital technologies and artificial intelligence, and therefore involves less human-to-human contact than ever before and more opportunities for biases to be embedded and codified in our technological systems in ways we may not even be able to identify or recognize. Bioengineering advances are opening up new terrain for challenging philosophical, political, and economic questions regarding human-natural relations. Additionally, the management of these large and small devices and systems is increasingly done through the cloud, so that control over them is both very remote and removed from direct human or social control. The study of how to make technologies like artificial intelligence or the Internet of Things “explainable” has become its own area of research because it is so difficult to understand how they work or what is at fault when something goes wrong (Gunning and Aha 2019) .

This growing complexity makes it more difficult than ever—and more imperative than ever—for scholars to probe how technological advancements are altering life around the world in both positive and negative ways and what social, political, and legal tools are needed to help shape the development and design of technology in beneficial directions. This can seem like an impossible task in light of the rapid pace of technological change and the sense that its continued advancement is inevitable, but many countries around the world are only just beginning to take significant steps toward regulating computer technologies and are still in the process of radically rethinking the rules governing global data flows and exchange of technology across borders.

These are exciting times not just for technological development but also for technology policy—our technologies may be more advanced and complicated than ever but so, too, are our understandings of how they can best be leveraged, protected, and even constrained. The structures of technological systems as determined largely by government and institutional policies and those structures have tremendous implications for social organization and agency, ranging from open source, open systems that are highly distributed and decentralized, to those that are tightly controlled and closed, structured according to stricter and more hierarchical models. And just as our understanding of the governance of technology is developing in new and interesting ways, so, too, is our understanding of the social, cultural, environmental, and political dimensions of emerging technologies. We are realizing both the challenges and the importance of mapping out the full range of ways that technology is changing our society, what we want those changes to look like, and what tools we have to try to influence and guide those shifts.

Technology can be a source of tremendous optimism. It can help overcome some of the greatest challenges our society faces, including climate change, famine, and disease. For those who believe in the power of innovation and the promise of creative destruction to advance economic development and lead to better quality of life, technology is a vital economic driver (Schumpeter 1942) . But it can also be a tool of tremendous fear and oppression, embedding biases in automated decision-making processes and information-processing algorithms, exacerbating economic and social inequalities within and between countries to a staggering degree, or creating new weapons and avenues for attack unlike any we have had to face in the past. Scholars have even contended that the emergence of the term technology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries marked a shift from viewing individual pieces of machinery as a means to achieving political and social progress to the more dangerous, or hazardous, view that larger-scale, more complex technological systems were a semiautonomous form of progress in and of themselves (Marx 2010) . More recently, technologists have sharply criticized what they view as a wave of new Luddites, people intent on slowing the development of technology and turning back the clock on innovation as a means of mitigating the societal impacts of technological change (Marlowe 1970) .

At the heart of fights over new technologies and their resulting global changes are often two conflicting visions of technology: a fundamentally optimistic one that believes humans use it as a tool to achieve greater goals, and a fundamentally pessimistic one that holds that technological systems have reached a point beyond our control. Technology philosophers have argued that neither of these views is wholly accurate and that a purely optimistic or pessimistic view of technology is insufficient to capture the nuances and complexity of our relationship to technology (Oberdiek and Tiles 1995) . Understanding technology and how we can make better decisions about designing, deploying, and refining it requires capturing that nuance and complexity through in-depth analysis of the impacts of different technological advancements and the ways they have played out in all their complicated and controversial messiness across the world.

These impacts are often unpredictable as technologies are adopted in new contexts and come to be used in ways that sometimes diverge significantly from the use cases envisioned by their designers. The internet, designed to help transmit information between computer networks, became a crucial vehicle for commerce, introducing unexpected avenues for crime and financial fraud. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, designed to connect friends and families through sharing photographs and life updates, became focal points of election controversies and political influence. Cryptocurrencies, originally intended as a means of decentralized digital cash, have become a significant environmental hazard as more and more computing resources are devoted to mining these forms of virtual money. One of the crucial challenges in this area is therefore recognizing, documenting, and even anticipating some of these unexpected consequences and providing mechanisms to technologists for how to think through the impacts of their work, as well as possible other paths to different outcomes (Verbeek 2006) . And just as technological innovations can cause unexpected harm, they can also bring about extraordinary benefits—new vaccines and medicines to address global pandemics and save thousands of lives, new sources of energy that can drastically reduce emissions and help combat climate change, new modes of education that can reach people who would otherwise have no access to schooling. Regulating technology therefore requires a careful balance of mitigating risks without overly restricting potentially beneficial innovations.

Nations around the world have taken very different approaches to governing emerging technologies and have adopted a range of different technologies themselves in pursuit of more modern governance structures and processes (Braman 2009) . In Europe, the precautionary principle has guided much more anticipatory regulation aimed at addressing the risks presented by technologies even before they are fully realized. For instance, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation focuses on the responsibilities of data controllers and processors to provide individuals with access to their data and information about how that data is being used not just as a means of addressing existing security and privacy threats, such as data breaches, but also to protect against future developments and uses of that data for artificial intelligence and automated decision-making purposes. In Germany, Technische Überwachungsvereine, or TÜVs, perform regular tests and inspections of technological systems to assess and minimize risks over time, as the tech landscape evolves. In the United States, by contrast, there is much greater reliance on litigation and liability regimes to address safety and security failings after-the-fact. These different approaches reflect not just the different legal and regulatory mechanisms and philosophies of different nations but also the different ways those nations prioritize rapid development of the technology industry versus safety, security, and individual control. Typically, governance innovations move much more slowly than technological innovations, and regulations can lag years, or even decades, behind the technologies they aim to govern.

In addition to this varied set of national regulatory approaches, a variety of international and nongovernmental organizations also contribute to the process of developing standards, rules, and norms for new technologies, including the International Organization for Standardization­ and the International Telecommunication Union. These multilateral and NGO actors play an especially important role in trying to define appropriate boundaries for the use of new technologies by governments as instruments of control for the state.

At the same time that policymakers are under scrutiny both for their decisions about how to regulate technology as well as their decisions about how and when to adopt technologies like facial recognition themselves, technology firms and designers have also come under increasing criticism. Growing recognition that the design of technologies can have far-reaching social and political implications means that there is more pressure on technologists to take into consideration the consequences of their decisions early on in the design process (Vincenti 1993; Winner 1980) . The question of how technologists should incorporate these social dimensions into their design and development processes is an old one, and debate on these issues dates back to the 1970s, but it remains an urgent and often overlooked part of the puzzle because so many of the supposedly systematic mechanisms for assessing the impacts of new technologies in both the private and public sectors are primarily bureaucratic, symbolic processes rather than carrying any real weight or influence.

Technologists are often ill-equipped or unwilling to respond to the sorts of social problems that their creations have—often unwittingly—exacerbated, and instead point to governments and lawmakers to address those problems (Zuckerberg 2019) . But governments often have few incentives to engage in this area. This is because setting clear standards and rules for an ever-evolving technological landscape can be extremely challenging, because enforcement of those rules can be a significant undertaking requiring considerable expertise, and because the tech sector is a major source of jobs and revenue for many countries that may fear losing those benefits if they constrain companies too much. This indicates not just a need for clearer incentives and better policies for both private- and public-sector entities but also a need for new mechanisms whereby the technology development and design process can be influenced and assessed by people with a wider range of experiences and expertise. If we want technologies to be designed with an eye to their impacts, who is responsible for predicting, measuring, and mitigating those impacts throughout the design process? Involving policymakers in that process in a more meaningful way will also require training them to have the analytic and technical capacity to more fully engage with technologists and understand more fully the implications of their decisions.

At the same time that tech companies seem unwilling or unable to rein in their creations, many also fear they wield too much power, in some cases all but replacing governments and international organizations in their ability to make decisions that affect millions of people worldwide and control access to information, platforms, and audiences (Kilovaty 2020) . Regulators around the world have begun considering whether some of these companies have become so powerful that they violate the tenets of antitrust laws, but it can be difficult for governments to identify exactly what those violations are, especially in the context of an industry where the largest players often provide their customers with free services. And the platforms and services developed by tech companies are often wielded most powerfully and dangerously not directly by their private-sector creators and operators but instead by states themselves for widespread misinformation campaigns that serve political purposes (Nye 2018) .

Since the largest private entities in the tech sector operate in many countries, they are often better poised to implement global changes to the technological ecosystem than individual states or regulatory bodies, creating new challenges to existing governance structures and hierarchies. Just as it can be challenging to provide oversight for government use of technologies, so, too, oversight of the biggest tech companies, which have more resources, reach, and power than many nations, can prove to be a daunting task. The rise of network forms of organization and the growing gig economy have added to these challenges, making it even harder for regulators to fully address the breadth of these companies’ operations (Powell 1990) . The private-public partnerships that have emerged around energy, transportation, medical, and cyber technologies further complicate this picture, blurring the line between the public and private sectors and raising critical questions about the role of each in providing critical infrastructure, health care, and security. How can and should private tech companies operating in these different sectors be governed, and what types of influence do they exert over regulators? How feasible are different policy proposals aimed at technological innovation, and what potential unintended consequences might they have?

Conflict between countries has also spilled over significantly into the private sector in recent years, most notably in the case of tensions between the United States and China over which technologies developed in each country will be permitted by the other and which will be purchased by other customers, outside those two countries. Countries competing to develop the best technology is not a new phenomenon, but the current conflicts have major international ramifications and will influence the infrastructure that is installed and used around the world for years to come. Untangling the different factors that feed into these tussles as well as whom they benefit and whom they leave at a disadvantage is crucial for understanding how governments can most effectively foster technological innovation and invention domestically as well as the global consequences of those efforts. As much of the world is forced to choose between buying technology from the United States or from China, how should we understand the long-term impacts of those choices and the options available to people in countries without robust domestic tech industries? Does the global spread of technologies help fuel further innovation in countries with smaller tech markets, or does it reinforce the dominance of the states that are already most prominent in this sector? How can research universities maintain global collaborations and research communities in light of these national competitions, and what role does government research and development spending play in fostering innovation within its own borders and worldwide? How should intellectual property protections evolve to meet the demands of the technology industry, and how can those protections be enforced globally?

These conflicts between countries sometimes appear to challenge the feasibility of truly global technologies and networks that operate across all countries through standardized protocols and design features. Organizations like the International Organization for Standardization, the World Intellectual Property Organization, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, and many others have tried to harmonize these policies and protocols across different countries for years, but have met with limited success when it comes to resolving the issues of greatest tension and disagreement among nations. For technology to operate in a global environment, there is a need for a much greater degree of coordination among countries and the development of common standards and norms, but governments continue to struggle to agree not just on those norms themselves but even the appropriate venue and processes for developing them. Without greater global cooperation, is it possible to maintain a global network like the internet or to promote the spread of new technologies around the world to address challenges of sustainability? What might help incentivize that cooperation moving forward, and what could new structures and process for governance of global technologies look like? Why has the tech industry’s self-regulation culture persisted? Do the same traditional drivers for public policy, such as politics of harmonization and path dependency in policy-making, still sufficiently explain policy outcomes in this space? As new technologies and their applications spread across the globe in uneven ways, how and when do they create forces of change from unexpected places?

These are some of the questions that we hope to address in the Technology and Global Change section through articles that tackle new dimensions of the global landscape of designing, developing, deploying, and assessing new technologies to address major challenges the world faces. Understanding these processes requires synthesizing knowledge from a range of different fields, including sociology, political science, economics, and history, as well as technical fields such as engineering, climate science, and computer science. A crucial part of understanding how technology has created global change and, in turn, how global changes have influenced the development of new technologies is understanding the technologies themselves in all their richness and complexity—how they work, the limits of what they can do, what they were designed to do, how they are actually used. Just as technologies themselves are becoming more complicated, so are their embeddings and relationships to the larger social, political, and legal contexts in which they exist. Scholars across all disciplines are encouraged to join us in untangling those complexities.

Josephine Wolff is an associate professor of cybersecurity policy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Her book You’ll See This Message When It Is Too Late: The Legal and Economic Aftermath of Cybersecurity Breaches was published by MIT Press in 2018.

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Home — Essay Samples — Science — Evolution — The Evolution of Technology

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The Evolution of Technology

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Published: Dec 18, 2018

Words: 640 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

Technology Essay: Hook Examples

  • The Digital Revolution: In the 21st century, technology has reshaped every facet of our lives. This essay delves into the profound impact of the digital revolution, from smartphones to artificial intelligence, and how it continues to shape our world.
  • From Stone Tools to Silicon Chips: Human history is marked by technological advancements. Join us as we journey through time, exploring the milestones that have propelled humanity from the Stone Age to the Information Age.
  • The Ethical Crossroads: Advancements in technology bring forth ethical dilemmas. This essay examines the ethical challenges posed by emerging technologies, from genetic engineering to surveillance, and the need for responsible innovation.
  • Technology in Education: Education is undergoing a digital transformation. Explore how technology is revolutionizing classrooms, expanding access to knowledge, and reshaping the way we learn.
  • The Future Unveiled: What does the future hold in the realm of technology? In this essay, we’ll peer into the crystal ball of tech trends, from quantum computing to space exploration, and envision the world that awaits us.

Works Cited

  • Feeney, A. (2019). Overcoming Fear: Finding the Courage to Face Your Fears and Embrace Change. John Wiley & Sons.
  • Seligman, M. E. (2006). Learned optimism: How to change your mind and your life. Vintage.
  • Adams, S. K. (2019). How to Overcome Fear and Find Your Courage: Overcoming Fear, Gaining Confidence, Building Trust, and Improving Self Esteem. Independently Published.
  • Brown, B. (2012). Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead. Avery.
  • Knaus, W. J. (2006). Fearless: Imagine Your Life Without Fear. American Management Association.
  • Chansky, T. E. (2014). Freeing your child from anxiety: Powerful, practical solutions to overcome your child’s fears, worries, and phobias. Harmony.
  • Lerner, H. G. (2015). Fear and other uninvited guests: Tackling the anxiety, fear, and shame that keep us from optimal living and loving. HarperCollins.
  • Rappaport, J. (2017). The Courage Habit: How to Accept Your Fears, Release the Past, and Live Your Courageous Life. New Harbinger Publications.
  • McGrath, C. (2018). The Psychology of Fear in Organizations: How to Transform Anxiety into Well-being, Productivity and Innovation. Kogan Page.
  • Gilbert, E. (2019). Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear. Riverhead Books.

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Technology in deep time: How it evolves alongside us

technology through the years essay

If we look at technology over very long timescales, our definition of what it is transforms, and as Tom Chatfield argues, it also displays a form of evolution entwined with our own.

If you consider our place in the history of the Universe, it is easy to see humans as an insignificant temporal speck, flickering in an unspeakably vast cosmos.

One common analogy illustrates this by telling the story of our planet’s 4.7-billion-year history as if it were the 24 hours of a single day. If you assume that the Earth coalesced an instant after midnight, it took around four hours for the first life to appear: microscopic organisms clustered around hydrothermal vents beneath young oceans. It took five more hours for photosynthesis to begin – and until midday for the atmosphere to become rich in oxygen. By 18:00 we had sexual reproduction; at 22:00 the first ever footprints appeared on land, left by lobster-sized sort-of-centipedes ; and by 23:00 the dinosaurs had arrived, only to exit 40 minutes later alongside three-quarters of Earth’s species in the planet’s fifth mass extinction.

Since then, the day’s remaining 20 minutes have seen the rise of the mammals, with something semi-human existing for about the last minute (three million years in real terms). Recorded history has lasted for the last tenth of a second, and the industrial revolution the last five thousandths of a second – by which point our analogy is fast becoming too microscopic to be useful.

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So far, so humbling. Looked at another way, however, this exercise emphasises something else. Life on Earth took a long time to get going, and even longer to build civilisations – yet once it did, the results have been remarkable.

Even in the context of several billion years of history, the last few human centuries have been astonishing. Our species has not only reshaped its planet’s biosphere, but is in the middle of engendering changes to its terrain, oceans and climate on a scale only asteroid impacts or centuries of apocalyptic volcanic eruptions previously equalled. The consequences of these changes will be measured in aeons. We have introduced something exponential into the equations of planetary time – and that something is technology.

Getty Images A worker heats a metal plate as they make traditional gong instruments in Indonesia (Credit: Getty Images)

We often think about technology as the latest innovation: the smartphone, the 3D printer, the VR headset. It’s only by taking a longer view, however, that we can understand its entwining with our species’ existence. For technology is more than computers, cars or gadgets. It is the entirety of human-made artefacts that extend and amplify our grasp of the world. As the philosopher Hannah Arendt put it in 1958 , we have in recent centuries developed a science “that considers the nature of the Earth from the viewpoint of the Universe”. Yet in doing so we have paradoxically trained ourselves to ignore the most important lesson of all: our co-evolution with technology.

What was the first human tool? We can’t be sure – but we do know that, from around two-and-a-half million years ago, our distant ancestors began to use found objects in a deliberate manner: hard or sharp stones, for breaking open shells or protection; sticks for reaching distant food; plants or animal parts for shelter or camouflage.

In this, and in their initial crafting and improvement of these objects, our ancestors weren’t so different from several other groups of animals. Plenty of creatures can communicate richly, comprehend one another’s intentions and put tools to intelligent and creative use: cetaceans, cephalopods, corvids. Some can even develop and pass on particular local practices: New Caledonian crows , for example, exhibit a “culture” of tool usage, creating distinct varieties of simple hooked tools from plants in order to help them feed.

Getty Images A hand-axe, estimated to be 2 million years old, at a museum in Muscat, Oman (Credit: Getty Images)

Only humans, however, have turned this craft into something unprecedented: a cumulative process of experiment and recombination that over mere hundreds of thousands of years harnessed phenomena such as fire to cook food, and ultimately smelt metal; as gravity into systems of levers, ramps, pulleys, wheels and counterweights; and mental processes into symbolic art, numeracy, and literacy.

It is this, above all, that marks humanity’s departure from the rest of life on Earth. Alone among species (at least until the crows have put in a million years more effort) humans can consciously improve and combine their creations over time – and in turn extend the boundaries of consciousness. It is through this process of recursive iteration that tools became technologies; and technology a world-altering force.

The economist W Brian Arthur is one of the most significant thinkers to have advanced this combinatorial account of technology, especially in his 2009 book The Nature of Technology . Central to Arthur’s argument is the insight that it’s not only pointless but also actively misleading to do what most history books cannot resist, and treat the history of technology as a greatest-hits list of influential inventions: to tell stirring tales of the impact of the compass, the clock, the printing press, the lightbulb, the iPhone.

This is not because such inventions weren’t hugely important, but because it obscures the fact that all new technologies are at root a combination of older technologies – and that this in turn traces an evolutionary process resembling life itself.

Consider the printing press, the invariable poster-child for anyone wanting to offer a quasi-historical perspective on the dissemination of information. The German inventor Johannes Gutenberg was, famously, the first European to develop a system for printing with movable type, in around 1440. Yet he was far from the first person to realise that using individual, movable components for each character in a sentence was a good way to speed up printing (as opposed to laboriously carving every page of text onto wood or metal).

Printing using individual porcelain characters had been developed in China in the 11th Century, and using metal character in Korea in the 13th Century. Gutenberg benefited, however, from the far smaller number of letters in German; from his knowledge of metal-smelting as a blacksmith and goldsmith, which helped him create a malleable-yet-durable alloy of lead, tin, and antimony; and from his insight that the kind of wooden presses used for centuries in Germany to make wine could be repurposed for pressing type against paper (itself a technology developed in China 1,500 years previously).

Wooden wine-presses, metal alloys, the Roman alphabet, oil-based ink, paper – every piece of the puzzle assembled by Gutenberg and his collaborators was based in a pre-existing technology whose origin could itself be traced back through previous technologies, in unbroken sequence, to the very first tools.

Getty Images An installation by Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda aiming to 'challenge the limits of human perception and digital technology' (Credit: Getty Images)

In a sense this is self-evident. It is, after all, only possible to build something out of components that exist – and these components must, in turn, have been assembled from other pre-existing components, and those from others that came before, and so on. Equally self-evidently, this accumulative combination is not by itself sufficient to explain technology’s evolution. Another force is required to drive it, and it’s similar to the one driving biological evolution itself: fitness as manifested through successful reproduction.

In the case of biological evolution, this process is based upon the transmission of genetic code from parents to offspring. The genetic code of successful organisms is passed on, while less successful organisms fall by the wayside. Genetic mutations produce incremental variations in species, some of which may prove favourable, while mechanisms such as sexual reproduction combine the genes of different individuals and potentially produce further advantages. Other mechanisms for the recombination of genes include micro-organisms like bacteria adapting themselves to exist entirely inside large cells, symbiotically conferring benefits upon their hosts.

DEEP CIVILISATION

This article is part of a  new BBC Future series about the long view of humanity , which aims to stand back from the daily news cycle and widen the lens of our current place in time. We will explore multi-generational thinking in all its forms, and hear from writers, researchers and artists who are looking beyond the short-term horizon.

Our goal is to explore what really matters in the broader arc of human history and what it means for our descendants, as well as revealing the hidden patterns shaping our societies in the long term.

In the case of technology, the business of survival and reproduction is symbiotic in a more fundamental way. This is because technology’s transmission has two distinct requirements: the ongoing existence of a species capable of manufacturing it, and networks of supply and maintenance capable of serving technology’s own evolving needs.

Humans’ fundamental needs are obvious enough – survival and reproduction, based upon adequate food, water, shelter and security – but in what sense can technology be said to have needs of its own? The answer lies all around us, in the immense interlinked ecology of the human-made world. Our creations require power, fuel, raw materials; globe-spanning networks of information, trade and transportation; the creation and maintenance of accrued layers of components that, precisely because they cannot reproduce or repair themselves, bring with them a list of needs far outstripping anything natural.

Getty Images A worker in China checks wheel hubs ready to be exported (Credit: Getty Images)

Consider the printing press one more time. Wine presses, smelted metal, paper, ink: the moment was ripe for a new technology to combine these and other elements. And it was ripe partly because sufficient interconnections of manufacture and supply existed to make combination feasible – and scalable. The paper Gutenberg used to print his bible was imported from the paper-making centre of Caselle in Piedmont, now a part of northern Italy; its delivery entailed transfer across the Alps by ox cart, then by barge along the waterways of the Rhine. Caselle’s expertise had in turn been learned from southern Italy, which had acquired it from Spain and North Africa, whose Muslim rulers had first brought knowledge of paper-making along the Silk Road from China.

In its separateness from and yet reliance upon biological life, technology is uniquely powerful and uniquely needy. It embodies an ever-expanding network of dependencies, and in this sense it invents many more needs than it serves – with both its requirements and its capacities growing at an exponential rate compared to our own.

Let’s go back to the history of our planet. Rather than being guided by clocks, however, let’s this time focus on events – and in particular the incremental accruals of technological evolution.

Time in the human sense doesn’t mean much when it comes to technology, because – unlike something living – a tool doesn’t struggle to survive or to pass on its pattern. Rather, it’s the increments of design, manufacture, refinement and combination that mark development. In this sense, no time whatsoever passes for a technology if there is no development. If a human population uses thousands upon thousands of identical farming tools in an identical way for thousands of years, that technology is frozen in stasis. To use an ancient tool is to enact a kind of time travel.

From this perspective, most of our planet’s history saw no technological time passing whatsoever. Four billion years were less than the blink of an eye – while the last few centuries loom larger than all the rest of history.

Getty Images 'Time in the human sense doesn’t mean much when it comes to technology' (Credit: Getty Images)

There’s a simple mathematical way of thinking about this. When it comes to combining things, increasing the number of components you’re working with vastly increases the number of potential combinations. Three modules can be combined in six different ways, assuming each module is used once; four modules can be combined in 24 different ways; and by the time you reach 10 modules, there are over three-and-a-half million combinations. What this means is that, thanks to the fertile recombination of ever-more technological possibilities, time and evolution are steadily speeding up from the perspective of our creations. And the rate at which they’re speeding up is itself increasing.

This has perhaps been most familiarly stated in the form of Moore’s law , which originated in a 1965 paper describing a doubling in transistor density every two years. This pattern of increasing complexity – and thus performance – has lasted for over half a century, and proved applicable to much more than microchips. Despite recent suggestions that transistor size and density are approaching their limits , the cost of computing performance itself continues to follow the law's exponential curve – as does the sheer volume of interlinked computers in the world.

This is the point where what Arendt termed “the onslaught of speed” starts to do strange things to time. Among the implications of Moore’s law, some thinkers have reasoned , is that the next two years are likely to see as much progress in computing terms as the entire history of technology from the beginning of time to the present – something that’s also likely to be true for the next two years, and the next.

And if this kind of analysis feels overfamiliar – or overstated – we can recapture its shock by putting things slightly differently. From the perspective of technology, humans have been getting exponentially slower every year for the last half-century. In the realm of software, there is more and more time available for adaptation and improvement – while, outside it, every human second takes longer and longer to creep past. We – evolved creatures of flesh and blood – are out of joint with our times in the most fundamental of senses.

All of which takes us towards one of the defining myths of our digital age, that of the Singularity : a technological point of no return beyond which, it’s argued, the evolution of technology will reach a tipping point where self-design and self-improvement take over, cutting humanity permanently out of the loop.

Getty Images Technology is so much more than the latest gadget (Credit: Getty Images)

Is any of this likely? My belief is that, like most myths, the least interesting thing we can do with this story is take it literally. Instead, its force lies in the expression of a truth we are already living: the fact that clock and calendar time have less and less relevance to the events that matter in our world. The present influence of our technology upon the planet is almost obscenely consequential – and what’s potentially tragic is the scale of the mismatch between the impact of our creations and our capacity to control them.

This brings us to the biggest question of all. Can we deflect the path of technology’s needs towards something like our own long-term interest, not to mention that of most other life on this planet? Not, I would argue, if we surrender to the seduction of thinking ourselves impotent or inconsequential – or technology’s future as a single, predetermined course.

Like our creations, we are minute in individual terms – yet of vast consequence collectively. It took the Earth 4.7 billion years to produce a human population of one billion; another 120 years to produce two billion; then less than a century to reach the seven-and-a-half billion humans currently alive, contemplating their future with all the tools of reason, wishfulness, knowledge and delusion that evolution and innovation have bequeathed.

This is what existence looks like at the sharp end of 4.7 billion years. We have less time than ever before – and more that we can accomplish.

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200-500 Word Example Essays about Technology

Got an essay assignment about technology check out these examples to inspire you.

Technology is a rapidly evolving field that has completely changed the way we live, work, and interact with one another. Technology has profoundly impacted our daily lives, from how we communicate with friends and family to how we access information and complete tasks. As a result, it's no surprise that technology is a popular topic for students writing essays.

But writing a technology essay can be challenging, especially for those needing more time or help with writer's block. This is where Jenni.ai comes in. Jenni.ai is an innovative AI tool explicitly designed for students who need help writing essays. With Jenni.ai, students can quickly and easily generate essays on various topics, including technology.

This blog post aims to provide readers with various example essays on technology, all generated by Jenni.ai. These essays will be a valuable resource for students looking for inspiration or guidance as they work on their essays. By reading through these example essays, students can better understand how technology can be approached and discussed in an essay.

Moreover, by signing up for a free trial with Jenni.ai, students can take advantage of this innovative tool and receive even more support as they work on their essays. Jenni.ai is designed to help students write essays faster and more efficiently, so they can focus on what truly matters – learning and growing as a student. Whether you're a student who is struggling with writer's block or simply looking for a convenient way to generate essays on a wide range of topics, Jenni.ai is the perfect solution.

The Impact of Technology on Society and Culture

Introduction:.

Technology has become an integral part of our daily lives and has dramatically impacted how we interact, communicate, and carry out various activities. Technological advancements have brought positive and negative changes to society and culture. In this article, we will explore the impact of technology on society and culture and how it has influenced different aspects of our lives.

Positive impact on communication:

Technology has dramatically improved communication and made it easier for people to connect from anywhere in the world. Social media platforms, instant messaging, and video conferencing have brought people closer, bridging geographical distances and cultural differences. This has made it easier for people to share information, exchange ideas, and collaborate on projects.

Positive impact on education:

Students and instructors now have access to a multitude of knowledge and resources because of the effect of technology on education. Students may now study at their speed and from any location thanks to online learning platforms, educational applications, and digital textbooks.

Negative impact on critical thinking and creativity:

Technological advancements have resulted in a reduction in critical thinking and creativity. With so much information at our fingertips, individuals have become more passive in their learning, relying on the internet for solutions rather than logic and inventiveness. As a result, independent thinking and problem-solving abilities have declined.

Positive impact on entertainment:

Technology has transformed how we access and consume entertainment. People may now access a wide range of entertainment alternatives from the comfort of their own homes thanks to streaming services, gaming platforms, and online content makers. The entertainment business has entered a new age of creativity and invention as a result of this.

Negative impact on attention span:

However, the continual bombardment of information and technological stimulation has also reduced attention span and the capacity to focus. People are easily distracted and need help focusing on a single activity for a long time. This has hampered productivity and the ability to accomplish duties.

The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence And Machine Learning

The development of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies has been one of the most significant technological developments of the past several decades. These cutting-edge technologies have the potential to alter several sectors of society, including commerce, industry, healthcare, and entertainment. 

As with any new and quickly advancing technology, AI and ML ethics must be carefully studied. The usage of these technologies presents significant concerns around privacy, accountability, and command. As the use of AI and ML grows more ubiquitous, we must assess their possible influence on society and investigate the ethical issues that must be taken into account as these technologies continue to develop.

What are Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning?

Artificial Intelligence is the simulation of human intelligence in machines designed to think and act like humans. Machine learning is a subfield of AI that enables computers to learn from data and improve their performance over time without being explicitly programmed.

The impact of AI and ML on Society

The use of AI and ML in various industries, such as healthcare, finance, and retail, has brought many benefits. For example, AI-powered medical diagnosis systems can identify diseases faster and more accurately than human doctors. However, there are also concerns about job displacement and the potential for AI to perpetuate societal biases.

The Ethical Considerations of AI and ML

A. Bias in AI algorithms

One of the critical ethical concerns about AI and ML is the potential for algorithms to perpetuate existing biases. This can occur if the data used to train these algorithms reflects the preferences of the people who created it. As a result, AI systems can perpetuate these biases and discriminate against certain groups of people.

B. Responsibility for AI-generated decisions

Another ethical concern is the responsibility for decisions made by AI systems. For example, who is responsible for the damage if a self-driving car causes an accident? The manufacturer of the vehicle, the software developer, or the AI algorithm itself?

C. The potential for misuse of AI and ML

AI and ML can also be used for malicious purposes, such as cyberattacks and misinformation. The need for more regulation and oversight in developing and using these technologies makes it difficult to prevent misuse.

The developments in AI and ML have given numerous benefits to humanity, but they also present significant ethical concerns that must be addressed. We must assess the repercussions of new technologies on society, implement methods to limit the associated dangers, and guarantee that they are utilized for the greater good. As AI and ML continue to play an ever-increasing role in our daily lives, we must engage in an open and frank discussion regarding their ethics.

The Future of Work And Automation

Rapid technological breakthroughs in recent years have brought about considerable changes in our way of life and work. Concerns regarding the influence of artificial intelligence and machine learning on the future of work and employment have increased alongside the development of these technologies. This article will examine the possible advantages and disadvantages of automation and its influence on the labor market, employees, and the economy.

The Advantages of Automation

Automation in the workplace offers various benefits, including higher efficiency and production, fewer mistakes, and enhanced precision. Automated processes may accomplish repetitive jobs quickly and precisely, allowing employees to concentrate on more complex and creative activities. Additionally, automation may save organizations money since it removes the need to pay for labor and minimizes the danger of workplace accidents.

The Potential Disadvantages of Automation

However, automation has significant disadvantages, including job loss and income stagnation. As robots and computers replace human labor in particular industries, there is a danger that many workers may lose their jobs, resulting in higher unemployment and more significant economic disparity. Moreover, if automation is not adequately regulated and managed, it might lead to stagnant wages and a deterioration in employees' standard of life.

The Future of Work and Automation

Despite these difficulties, automation will likely influence how labor is done. As a result, firms, employees, and governments must take early measures to solve possible issues and reap the rewards of automation. This might entail funding worker retraining programs, enhancing education and skill development, and implementing regulations that support equality and justice at work.

IV. The Need for Ethical Considerations

We must consider the ethical ramifications of automation and its effects on society as technology develops. The impact on employees and their rights, possible hazards to privacy and security, and the duty of corporations and governments to ensure that automation is utilized responsibly and ethically are all factors to be taken into account.

Conclusion:

To summarise, the future of employment and automation will most certainly be defined by a complex interaction of technological advances, economic trends, and cultural ideals. All stakeholders must work together to handle the problems and possibilities presented by automation and ensure that technology is employed to benefit society as a whole.

The Role of Technology in Education

Introduction.

Nearly every part of our lives has been transformed by technology, and education is no different. Today's students have greater access to knowledge, opportunities, and resources than ever before, and technology is becoming a more significant part of their educational experience. Technology is transforming how we think about education and creating new opportunities for learners of all ages, from online courses and virtual classrooms to instructional applications and augmented reality.

Technology's Benefits for Education

The capacity to tailor learning is one of technology's most significant benefits in education. Students may customize their education to meet their unique needs and interests since they can access online information and tools. 

For instance, people can enroll in online classes on topics they are interested in, get tailored feedback on their work, and engage in virtual discussions with peers and subject matter experts worldwide. As a result, pupils are better able to acquire and develop the abilities and information necessary for success.

Challenges and Concerns

Despite the numerous advantages of technology in education, there are also obstacles and considerations to consider. One issue is the growing reliance on technology and the possibility that pupils would become overly dependent on it. This might result in a lack of critical thinking and problem-solving abilities, as students may become passive learners who only follow instructions and rely on technology to complete their assignments.

Another obstacle is the digital divide between those who have access to technology and those who do not. This division can exacerbate the achievement gap between pupils and produce uneven educational and professional growth chances. To reduce these consequences, all students must have access to the technology and resources necessary for success.

In conclusion, technology is rapidly becoming an integral part of the classroom experience and has the potential to alter the way we learn radically. 

Technology can help students flourish and realize their full potential by giving them access to individualized instruction, tools, and opportunities. While the benefits of technology in the classroom are undeniable, it's crucial to be mindful of the risks and take precautions to guarantee that all kids have access to the tools they need to thrive.

The Influence of Technology On Personal Relationships And Communication 

Technological advancements have profoundly altered how individuals connect and exchange information. It has changed the world in many ways in only a few decades. Because of the rise of the internet and various social media sites, maintaining relationships with people from all walks of life is now simpler than ever. 

However, concerns about how these developments may affect interpersonal connections and dialogue are inevitable in an era of rapid technological growth. In this piece, we'll discuss how the prevalence of digital media has altered our interpersonal connections and the language we use to express ourselves.

Direct Effect on Direct Interaction:

The disruption of face-to-face communication is a particularly stark example of how technology has impacted human connections. The quality of interpersonal connections has suffered due to people's growing preference for digital over human communication. Technology has been demonstrated to reduce the usage of nonverbal signs such as facial expressions, tone of voice, and other indicators of emotional investment in the connection.

Positive Impact on Long-Distance Relationships:

Yet there are positives to be found as well. Long-distance relationships have also benefited from technological advancements. The development of technologies such as video conferencing, instant messaging, and social media has made it possible for individuals to keep in touch with distant loved ones. It has become simpler for individuals to stay in touch and feel connected despite geographical distance.

The Effects of Social Media on Personal Connections:

The widespread use of social media has had far-reaching consequences, especially on the quality of interpersonal interactions. Social media has positive and harmful effects on relationships since it allows people to keep in touch and share life's milestones.

Unfortunately, social media has made it all too easy to compare oneself to others, which may lead to emotions of jealousy and a general decline in confidence. Furthermore, social media might cause people to have inflated expectations of themselves and their relationships.

A Personal Perspective on the Intersection of Technology and Romance

Technological advancements have also altered physical touch and closeness. Virtual reality and other technologies have allowed people to feel physical contact and familiarity in a digital setting. This might be a promising breakthrough, but it has some potential downsides. 

Experts are concerned that people's growing dependence on technology for intimacy may lead to less time spent communicating face-to-face and less emphasis on physical contact, both of which are important for maintaining good relationships.

In conclusion, technological advancements have significantly affected the quality of interpersonal connections and the exchange of information. Even though technology has made it simpler to maintain personal relationships, it has chilled interpersonal interactions between people. 

Keeping tabs on how technology is changing our lives and making adjustments as necessary is essential as we move forward. Boundaries and prioritizing in-person conversation and physical touch in close relationships may help reduce the harm it causes.

The Security and Privacy Implications of Increased Technology Use and Data Collection

The fast development of technology over the past few decades has made its way into every aspect of our life. Technology has improved many facets of our life, from communication to commerce. However, significant privacy and security problems have emerged due to the broad adoption of technology. In this essay, we'll look at how the widespread use of technological solutions and the subsequent explosion in collected data affects our right to privacy and security.

Data Mining and Privacy Concerns

Risk of Cyber Attacks and Data Loss

The Widespread Use of Encryption and Other Safety Mechanisms

The Privacy and Security of the Future in a Globalized Information Age

Obtaining and Using Individual Information

The acquisition and use of private information is a significant cause for privacy alarm in the digital age. Data about their customers' online habits, interests, and personal information is a valuable commodity for many internet firms. Besides tailored advertising, this information may be used for other, less desirable things like identity theft or cyber assaults.

Moreover, many individuals need to be made aware of what data is being gathered from them or how it is being utilized because of the lack of transparency around gathering personal information. Privacy and data security have become increasingly contentious as a result.

Data breaches and other forms of cyber-attack pose a severe risk.

The risk of cyber assaults and data breaches is another big issue of worry. More people are using more devices, which means more opportunities for cybercriminals to steal private information like credit card numbers and other identifying data. This may cause monetary damages and harm one's reputation or identity.

Many high-profile data breaches have occurred in recent years, exposing the personal information of millions of individuals and raising serious concerns about the safety of this information. Companies and governments have responded to this problem by adopting new security methods like encryption and multi-factor authentication.

Many businesses now use encryption and other security measures to protect themselves from cybercriminals and data thieves. Encryption keeps sensitive information hidden by encoding it so that only those possessing the corresponding key can decipher it. This prevents private information like bank account numbers or social security numbers from falling into the wrong hands.

Firewalls, virus scanners, and two-factor authentication are all additional security precautions that may be used with encryption. While these safeguards do much to stave against cyber assaults, they are not entirely impregnable, and data breaches are still possible.

The Future of Privacy and Security in a Technologically Advanced World

There's little doubt that concerns about privacy and security will persist even as technology improves. There must be strict safeguards to secure people's private information as more and more of it is transferred and kept digitally. To achieve this goal, it may be necessary to implement novel technologies and heightened levels of protection and to revise the rules and regulations regulating the collection and storage of private information.

Individuals and businesses are understandably concerned about the security and privacy consequences of widespread technological use and data collecting. There are numerous obstacles to overcome in a society where technology plays an increasingly important role, from acquiring and using personal data to the risk of cyber-attacks and data breaches. Companies and governments must keep spending money on security measures and working to educate people about the significance of privacy and security if personal data is to remain safe.

In conclusion, technology has profoundly impacted virtually every aspect of our lives, including society and culture, ethics, work, education, personal relationships, and security and privacy. The rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning has presented new ethical considerations, while automation is transforming the future of work. 

In education, technology has revolutionized the way we learn and access information. At the same time, our dependence on technology has brought new challenges in terms of personal relationships, communication, security, and privacy.

Jenni.ai is an AI tool that can help students write essays easily and quickly. Whether you're looking, for example, for essays on any of these topics or are seeking assistance in writing your essay, Jenni.ai offers a convenient solution. Sign up for a free trial today and experience the benefits of AI-powered writing assistance for yourself.

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The brief history of artificial intelligence: The world has changed fast – what might be next?

Despite their brief history, computers and ai have fundamentally changed what we see, what we know, and what we do. little is as important for the future of the world, and our own lives, as how this history continues..

To see what the future might look like, it is often helpful to study our history. This is what I will do in this article. I retrace the brief history of computers and artificial intelligence to see what we can expect for the future.

How did we get here?

How rapidly the world has changed becomes clear by how even quite recent computer technology feels ancient today. Mobile phones in the ‘90s were big bricks with tiny green displays. Two decades before that, the main storage for computers was punch cards.

In a short period, computers evolved so quickly and became such an integral part of our daily lives that it is easy to forget how recent this technology is. The first digital computers were only invented about eight decades ago, as the timeline shows.

technology through the years essay

Since the early days of this history, some computer scientists have strived to make machines as intelligent as humans. The next timeline shows some of the notable artificial intelligence (AI) systems and describes what they were capable of.

The first system I mention is the Theseus. It was built by Claude Shannon in 1950 and was a remote-controlled mouse that was able to find its way out of a labyrinth and could remember its course. 1 In seven decades, the abilities of artificial intelligence have come a long way.

technology through the years essay

The language and image recognition capabilities of AI systems have developed very rapidly

The chart shows how we got here by zooming into the last two decades of AI development. The plotted data stems from a number of tests in which human and AI performance were evaluated in five different domains, from handwriting recognition to language understanding.

Within each of the five domains, the initial performance of the AI system is set to -100, and human performance in these tests is used as a baseline set to zero. This means that when the model’s performance crosses the zero line is when the AI system scored more points in the relevant test than the humans who did the same test. 3

Just 10 years ago, no machine could reliably provide language or image recognition at a human level. But, as the chart shows, AI systems have become steadily more capable and are now beating humans in tests in all these domains. 4

Outside of these standardized tests, the performance of these AIs is mixed. In some real-world cases, these systems are still performing much worse than humans. On the other hand, some implementations of such AI systems are already so cheap that they are available on the phone in your pocket: image recognition categorizes your photos and speech recognition transcribes what you dictate.

Language and image recognition capabilities of AI systems have improved rapidly 2

technology through the years essay

From image recognition to image generation

The previous chart showed the rapid advances in the perceptive abilities of artificial intelligence. AI systems have also become much more capable of generating images.

This series of nine images shows the development over the last nine years. None of the people in these images exist; all were generated by an AI system.

The series begins with an image from 2014 in the top left, a primitive image of a pixelated face in black and white. As the first image in the second row shows, just three years later, AI systems were already able to generate images that were hard to differentiate from a photograph.

In recent years, the capability of AI systems has become much more impressive still. While the early systems focused on generating images of faces, these newer models broadened their capabilities to text-to-image generation based on almost any prompt. The image in the bottom right shows that even the most challenging prompts – such as “A Pomeranian is sitting on the King’s throne wearing a crown. Two tiger soldiers are standing next to the throne” – are turned into photorealistic images within seconds. 6

Timeline of images generated by artificial intelligence 5

Timeline of images generated by artificial intelligence

Language recognition and production is developing fast

Just as striking as the advances of image-generating AIs is the rapid development of systems that parse and respond to human language.

Shown in the image are examples from an AI system developed by Google called PaLM. In these six examples, the system was asked to explain six different jokes. I find the explanation in the bottom right particularly remarkable: the AI explains an anti-joke specifically meant to confuse the listener.

AIs that produce language have entered our world in many ways over the last few years. Emails get auto-completed, massive amounts of online texts get translated, videos get automatically transcribed, school children use language models to do their homework, reports get auto-generated, and media outlets publish AI-generated journalism.

AI systems are not yet able to produce long, coherent texts. In the future, we will see whether the recent developments will slow down – or even end – or whether we will one day read a bestselling novel written by an AI.

Output of the AI system PaLM after being asked to interpret six different jokes 7

technology through the years essay

Where we are now: AI is here

These rapid advances in AI capabilities have made it possible to use machines in a wide range of new domains:

When you book a flight, it is often an artificial intelligence, no longer a human, that decides what you pay. When you get to the airport, it is an AI system that monitors what you do at the airport. And once you are on the plane, an AI system assists the pilot in flying you to your destination.

AI systems also increasingly determine whether you get a loan , are eligible for welfare or get hired for a particular job. Increasingly they help determine who gets released from jail .

Several governments have purchased autonomous weapons systems for warfare, and some use AI systems for surveillance and oppression .

AI systems help to program the software you use and translate the texts you read. Virtual assistants , operated by speech recognition, have entered many households over the last decade. Now self-driving cars are becoming a reality.

In the last few years, AI systems helped to make progress on some of the hardest problems in science.

Large AIs called recommender systems determine what you see on social media, which products are shown to you in online shops, and what gets recommended to you on YouTube. Increasingly they are not just recommending the media we consume, but based on their capacity to generate images and texts, they are also creating the media we consume.

Artificial intelligence is no longer a technology of the future; AI is here, and much of what is reality now would have looked like sci-fi just recently. It is a technology that already impacts all of us, and the list above includes just a few of its many applications .

The wide range of listed applications makes clear that this is a very general technology that can be used by people for some extremely good goals – and some extraordinarily bad ones, too. For such “dual-use technologies”, it is important that all of us develop an understanding of what is happening and how we want the technology to be used.

Just two decades ago, the world was very different. What might AI technology be capable of in the future?

What is next?

The AI systems that we just considered are the result of decades of steady advances in AI technology.

The big chart below brings this history over the last eight decades into perspective. It is based on the dataset produced by Jaime Sevilla and colleagues. 8

The rise of artificial intelligence over the last 8 decades: As training computation has increased, AI systems have become more powerful 9

technology through the years essay

Each small circle in this chart represents one AI system. The circle’s position on the horizontal axis indicates when the AI system was built, and its position on the vertical axis shows the amount of computation used to train the particular AI system.

Training computation is measured in floating point operations , or FLOP for short. One FLOP is equivalent to one addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division of two decimal numbers.

All AI systems that rely on machine learning need to be trained, and in these systems, training computation is one of the three fundamental factors that are driving the capabilities of the system. The other two factors are the algorithms and the input data used for the training. The visualization shows that as training computation has increased, AI systems have become more and more powerful.

The timeline goes back to the 1940s, the beginning of electronic computers. The first shown AI system is ‘Theseus’, Claude Shannon’s robotic mouse from 1950 that I mentioned at the beginning. Towards the other end of the timeline, you find AI systems like DALL-E and PaLM, whose abilities to produce photorealistic images and interpret and generate language we have just seen. They are among the AI systems that used the largest amount of training computation to date.

The training computation is plotted on a logarithmic scale so that from each grid line to the next, it shows a 100-fold increase. This long-run perspective shows a continuous increase. For the first six decades, training computation increased in line with Moore’s Law , doubling roughly every 20 months. Since about 2010, this exponential growth has sped up further, to a doubling time of just about 6 months. That is an astonishingly fast rate of growth. 10

The fast doubling times have accrued to large increases. PaLM’s training computation was 2.5 billion petaFLOP, more than 5 million times larger than AlexNet, the AI with the largest training computation just 10 years earlier. 11

Scale-up was already exponential and has sped up substantially over the past decade. What can we learn from this historical development for the future of AI?

Studying the long-run trends to predict the future of AI

AI researchers study these long-term trends to see what is possible in the future. 12

Perhaps the most widely discussed study of this kind was published by AI researcher Ajeya Cotra. She studied the increase in training computation to ask at what point the computation to train an AI system could match that of the human brain. The idea is that, at this point, the AI system would match the capabilities of a human brain. In her latest update, Cotra estimated a 50% probability that such “transformative AI” will be developed by the year 2040, less than two decades from now. 13

In a related article , I discuss what transformative AI would mean for the world. In short, the idea is that such an AI system would be powerful enough to bring the world into a ‘qualitatively different future’. It could lead to a change at the scale of the two earlier major transformations in human history, the agricultural and industrial revolutions. It would certainly represent the most important global change in our lifetimes.

Cotra’s work is particularly relevant in this context as she based her forecast on the kind of historical long-run trend of training computation that we just studied. But it is worth noting that other forecasters who rely on different considerations arrive at broadly similar conclusions. As I show in my article on AI timelines , many AI experts believe that there is a real chance that human-level artificial intelligence will be developed within the next decades, and some believe that it will exist much sooner.

Building a public resource to enable the necessary public conversation

Computers and artificial intelligence have changed our world immensely, but we are still in the early stages of this history. Because this technology feels so familiar, it is easy to forget that all of these technologies we interact with are very recent innovations and that the most profound changes are yet to come.

Artificial intelligence has already changed what we see, what we know, and what we do. This is despite the fact that this technology has had only a brief history.

There are no signs that these trends are hitting any limits anytime soon. On the contrary, particularly over the course of the last decade, the fundamental trends have accelerated: investments in AI technology have rapidly increased , and the doubling time of training computation has shortened to just six months.

All major technological innovations lead to a range of positive and negative consequences. This is already true of artificial intelligence. As this technology becomes more and more powerful, we should expect its impact to become greater still.

Because of the importance of AI, we should all be able to form an opinion on where this technology is heading and understand how this development is changing our world. For this purpose, we are building a repository of AI-related metrics, which you can find on OurWorldinData.org/artificial-intelligence .

We are still in the early stages of this history, and much of what will become possible is yet to come. A technological development as powerful as this should be at the center of our attention. Little might be as important for how the future of our world – and the future of our lives – will play out.

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank my colleagues Natasha Ahuja, Daniel Bachler, Julia Broden, Charlie Giattino, Bastian Herre, Edouard Mathieu, and Ike Saunders for their helpful comments to drafts of this essay and their contributions in preparing the visualizations.

On the Theseus see Daniel Klein (2019) – Mighty mouse , Published in MIT Technology Review. And this video on YouTube of a presentation by its inventor Claude Shannon.

Data from Kiela et al. (2021) – Dynabench: Rethinking Benchmarking in NLP. arXiv:2104.14337v1; https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2104.14337

The chart shows that the speed at which these AI technologies developed increased over time. Systems for which development was started early – handwriting and speech recognition – took more than a decade to approach human-level performance, while more recent AI developments led to systems that overtook humans in only a few years. However, one should not overstate this point. To some extent, this is dependent on when the researchers started to compare machine and human performance. One could have started evaluating the system for language understanding much earlier, and its development would appear much slower in this presentation of the data.

It is important to remember that while these are remarkable achievements — and show very rapid gains — these are the results from specific benchmarking tests. Outside of tests, AI models can fail in surprising ways and do not reliably achieve performance that is comparable with human capabilities.

The relevant publications are the following:

2014: Goodfellow et al.: Generative Adversarial Networks

2015: Radford, Metz, and Chintala: Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks

2016: Liu and Tuzel: Coupled Generative Adversarial Networks

2017: Karras et al.: Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation

2018: Karras, Laine, and Aila: A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks (StyleGAN from NVIDIA)

2019: Karras et al.: Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN

AI-generated faces generated by this technology can be found on thispersondoesnotexist.com .

2020: Ho, Jain, and Abbeel: Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models

2021: Ramesh et al: Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation (first DALL-E from OpenAI; blog post ). See also Ramesh et al. (2022) – Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents (DALL-E 2 from OpenAI; blog post ).

2022: Saharia et al: Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding (Google’s Imagen; blog post )

Because these systems have become so powerful, the latest AI systems often don’t allow the user to generate images of human faces to prevent abuse.

From Chowdhery et al. (2022) –  PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways . Published on arXiv on 7 Apr 2022.

See the footnote on the chart's title for the references and additional information.

The data is taken from Jaime Sevilla, Lennart Heim, Anson Ho, Tamay Besiroglu, Marius Hobbhahn, Pablo Villalobos (2022) – Compute Trends Across Three eras of Machine Learning . Published in arXiv on March 9, 2022. See also their post on the Alignment Forum .

The authors regularly update and extend their dataset, a helpful service to the AI research community. At Our World in Data, my colleague Charlie Giattino regularly updates the interactive version of this chart with the latest data made available by Sevilla and coauthors.

See also these two related charts:

Number of parameters in notable artificial intelligence systems

Number of datapoints used to train notable artificial intelligence systems

At some point in the future, training computation is expected to slow down to the exponential growth rate of Moore's Law. Tamay Besiroglu, Lennart Heim, and Jaime Sevilla of the Epoch team estimate in their report that the highest probability for this reversion occurring is in the early 2030s.

The training computation of PaLM, developed in 2022, was 2,700,000,000 petaFLOP. The training computation of AlexNet, the AI with the largest training computation up to 2012, was 470 petaFLOP. 2,500,000,000 petaFLOP / 470 petaFLOP = 5,319,148.9. At the same time, the amount of training computation required to achieve a given performance has been falling exponentially.

The costs have also increased quickly. The cost to train PaLM is estimated to be $9–$23 million, according to Lennart Heim, a researcher in the Epoch team. See Lennart Heim (2022) – Estimating PaLM's training cost .

Scaling up the size of neural networks – in terms of the number of parameters and the amount of training data and computation – has led to surprising increases in the capabilities of AI systems. This realization motivated the “scaling hypothesis.” See Gwern Branwen (2020) – The Scaling Hypothesis ⁠.

Her research was announced in various places, including in the AI Alignment Forum here: Ajeya Cotra (2020) –  Draft report on AI timelines . As far as I know, the report always remained a “draft report” and was published here on Google Docs .

The cited estimate stems from Cotra’s Two-year update on my personal AI timelines , in which she shortened her median timeline by 10 years.

Cotra emphasizes that there are substantial uncertainties around her estimates and therefore communicates her findings in a range of scenarios. She published her big study in 2020, and her median estimate at the time was that around the year 2050, there will be a 50%-probability that the computation required to train such a model may become affordable. In her “most conservative plausible”-scenario, this point in time is pushed back to around 2090, and in her “most aggressive plausible”-scenario, this point is reached in 2040.

The same is true for most other forecasters: all emphasize the large uncertainty associated with their forecasts .

It is worth emphasizing that the computation of the human brain is highly uncertain. See Joseph Carlsmith's New Report on How Much Computational Power It Takes to Match the Human Brain from 2020.

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This timeline charts the fast pace of tech transformation across centuries

Technology has become increasingly powerful in recent decades.

Technology has become increasingly powerful in recent decades. Image:  Unsplash/Maxim Hopman

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Stay up to date:, emerging technologies.

  • The pace of technological change is much faster now than it has been in the past, according to Our World in Data.
  • It took 2.4 million years for our ancestors to control fire and use it for cooking, but 66 years to go from the first flight to humans landing on the moon.
  • AI could have a fundamentally transformative impact on our world, with many experts believing human-level artificial intelligence will be developed within decades.

Technology can change the world in ways that are unimaginable, until they happen. Switching on an electric light would have been unimaginable for our medieval ancestors. In their childhood, our grandparents would have struggled to imagine a world connected by smartphones and the Internet.

Similarly, it is hard for us to imagine the arrival of all those technologies that will fundamentally change the world we are used to.

We can remind ourselves that our own future might look very different from the world today by looking back at how rapidly technology has changed our world in the past. That’s what this article is about.

One insight I take away from this long-term perspective is how unusual our time is. Technological change was extremely slow in the past – the technologies that our ancestors got used to in their childhood were still central to their lives in their old age. In stark contrast to those days, we live in a time of extraordinarily fast technological change. For recent generations, it was common for technologies that were unimaginable in their youth to become common later in life.

The long-run perspective on technological change

The big visualization offers a long-term perspective on the history of technology.

The timeline begins at the center of the spiral. The first use of stone tools, 3.4 million years ago, marks the beginning of this history of technology. Each turn of the spiral then represents 200,000 years of history. It took 2.4 million years – 12 turns of the spiral – for our ancestors to control fire and use it for cooking.

To be able to visualize the inventions in the more recent past – the last 12,000 years – I had to unroll the spiral. I needed more space to be able to show when agriculture, writing, and the wheel were invented. During this period, technological change was faster, but it was still relatively slow: several thousand years passed between each of these three inventions.

From 1800 onwards, I stretched out the timeline even further to show the many major inventions that rapidly followed one after the other.

The long-term perspective that this chart provides makes it clear just how unusually fast technological change is in our time.

You can use this visualization to see how technology developed in particular domains. Follow, for example, the history of communication: from writing, to paper, to the printing press, to the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, all the way to the Internet and smartphones.

Or follow the rapid development of human flight. In 1903, the Wright brothers took the first flight in human history (they were in the air for less than a minute), and just 66 years later, we landed on the moon. Many people saw both within their lifetimes: the first plane and the moon landing.

This large visualization also highlights the wide range of technology’s impact on our lives. It includes extraordinarily beneficial innovations, such as the vaccine that allowed humanity to eradicate smallpox , and it includes terrible innovations, like the nuclear bombs that endanger the lives of all of us .

This large visualization highlights the wide range of technology’s impact on our lives.

What will the next decades bring?

The red timeline reaches up to the present and then continues in green into the future. Many children born today, even without any further increases in life expectancy, will live well into the 22nd century.

New vaccines, progress in clean, low-carbon energy, better cancer treatments – a range of future innovations could very much improve our living conditions and the environment around us. But, as I argue in a series of articles , there is one technology that could even more profoundly change our world: artificial intelligence (AI).

One reason why artificial intelligence is such an important innovation is that intelligence is the main driver of innovation itself. This fast-paced technological change could speed up even more if it’s not only driven by humanity’s intelligence, but artificial intelligence too. If this happens, the change that is currently stretched out over the course of decades might happen within very brief time spans of just a year. Possibly even faster. 4

The Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2023 report outlined the technologies poised to positively impact society in the next few years, from health technology to AI to sustainable computing.

The World Economic Forum’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution is driving responsible technology governance, enabling industry transformation, addressing planetary health, and promoting equity and inclusion.

Learn more about our impact:

  • Digital inclusion: Our EDISON Alliance is mobilizing leaders from across sectors to accelerate digital inclusion, having positively impacted the lives of 454 million people through the activation of 250 initiatives across 90 countries.
  • AI in developing economies: Our Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Rwanda is promoting the adoption of new technologies in the country, enabling over 4,000 daily health consultations using AI.
  • Innovative healthcare: Our Medicine from the Sky initiative is using drones to deliver medicine to remote areas in India, completing over 950 successful drone flights.
  • AI for agriculture: We are working with the Government of India to scale up agricultural technology in the country, helping more than 7,000 farmers monitor the health of their crops and soil using AI.

Want to know more about our centre’s impact or get involved? Contact us .

I think AI technology could have a fundamentally transformative impact on our world. In many ways, it is already changing our world, as I documented in this companion article . As this technology is becoming more capable in the years and decades to come, it can give immense power to those who control it (and it poses the risk that it could escape our control entirely).

Such systems might seem hard to imagine today, but AI technology is advancing very fast. Many AI experts believe there is a real chance that human-level artificial intelligence will be developed within the next decades, as I documented in this article .

Technology will continue to change the world – we should all make sure that it changes it for the better

What is familiar to us today – photography, the radio, antibiotics, the Internet, or the International Space Station circling our planet – was unimaginable to our ancestors just a few generations ago. If your great-great-great grandparents could spend a week with you they would be blown away by your everyday life.

What I take away from this history is that I will likely see technologies in my lifetime that appear unimaginable to me today.

In addition to this trend towards increasingly rapid innovation, there is a second long-run trend. Technology has become increasingly powerful. While our ancestors wielded stone tools, we are building globe-spanning AI systems and technologies that can edit our genes.

Because of the immense power that technology gives those who control it, there is little that is as important as the question of which technologies get developed during our lifetimes. Therefore I think it is a mistake to leave the question about the future of technology to the technologists. Which technologies are controlled by whom is one of the most important political questions of our time, because of the enormous power that these technologies convey to those who control them.

We all should strive to gain the knowledge we need to contribute to an intelligent debate about the world we want to live in. To a large part this means gaining the knowledge, and wisdom, on the question of which technologies we want.

Have you read?

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How Tech Has Changed Our Lives In The Last 10 Years

Several tech experts weigh in on the technologies of the past decade that had the greatest impact on society.

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Ari Shapiro. And...

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

MICHELE NORRIS: I'm Michele Norris.

MELISSA BLOCK: I'm Melissa Block, and it's time now for All Tech Considered.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

SHAPIRO: That is how the first All Tech Considered of the decade began on January 4, 2010. Sad to say, Michele and Melissa are not here in the studio with me this Christmas Day. A lot has changed since then - hosts of this program and technology.

In a minute, we'll look ahead to the next decade in tech. Before we do, let's revisit this one. We asked three experts to pick what they see as the most significant ways tech has changed our lives since 2009. The most obvious advancement was the smartphone. They were around in 2009, but now 81% of Americans own one. And technology reporter Omar Gallaga says they've almost become an appendage.

OMAR GALLAGA: I was in a restaurant over the weekend, and, you know, just across from me, a woman's phone was going off every five seconds. You know, I heard a chime or an alert - you know, different alerts out of her phone every - and I'm, like, how is she functioning as a human in this world? You know, she didn't even notice that those alerts were going off. I mean, that's how much a part of her life they must be, so...

SHAPIRO: And it's not just the phones. Gallaga's daughters, who are 10 and 12, have tablets. He says kids these days just go through life differently from a decade ago.

GALLAGA: When you see kids at the doctor's office looking at magazines, and they're trying to, like, you know, scroll the page (laughter), the print page - like, yeah. Yep, that's an iPad kid right there.

SHAPIRO: Next, we turn to Erin Hatton. She is an associate professor of sociology at the University at Buffalo. And for her, the most significant change of the decade is something that would not have been possible without the smartphone - it's the gig economy, enabled by apps like Uber, TaskRabbit and Airbnb. Hatton says they've redefined what it is to be a worker.

ERIN HATTON: I think that this work has started new conversations between workers and across sectors in rethinking what it means to be a worker and potentially rethinking what kinds of benefits and protections we attach to work.

SHAPIRO: Beyond our daily lives or our work, tech in the last decade has also shaped what we believe to be true. Sometimes we know we're being faked, like in Martin Scorsese's movie "The Irishman." Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, who are both in their 70s, look much younger thanks to technology. In some scenes, they're in their 40s.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE IRISHMAN")

JOE PESCI: (As Russell Bufalino) What's the problem, kid?

ROBERT DE NIRO: (As Frank Sheeran) I don't know. It sounds funny - stops and starts and loses power.

PESCI: (As Russell Bufalino) I can give you a hand.

SHAPIRO: It's believable. Of course, there is a darker side of this technology, too. Michael Fink is a professor of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, and he says it's easier than ever before to manipulate videos and make it seem like something happened when it never did.

MICHAEL FINK: The software has become so powerful that things can be altered, changed, modified so quickly that people would think, oh, my god. That has to be real. It just happened. And that's not true. The reality is fungible. It can be used by dark forces - let's put it that way - people with absolutely nothing but malevolence at the core of their being. And it's scary.

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The Evolution of Technology: Past, Present and Future

Technology has become an integral part of our lives. From smartphones to computers, these technologies have become indispensable, and we heavily rely on them. In a relatively short span of time, technology has rapidly advanced and now, many people cannot imagine life without it.

To fully understand the scope of this transformation, we must look at how technology has evolved and its significance.

Purpose Drives Technology Forward

All technologies serve a purpose. For instance, search engines were created to organize vast amounts of online data. Each upgrade builds upon existing technologies, leading to continuous improvement. However, this lightning-fast pace of technological evolution has made it challenging for many to keep up.

Admittedly, summarizing the vast scope of technology in a single blog post is nearly impossible. That said, here's a brief glimpse into the rapid evolution of the Internet and technology in recent years.

The Past: World, Meet the Internet

Looking back to the 1990s, the Internet was a new commodity that gradually became accessible to households and businesses. For those living in that era, the nostalgic sound of the painfully slow dial-up signal connecting to the Internet remains a vivid memory (EEEE-AAAAAHH!!!!).

Fortunately, as the Internet gained popularity, technology advanced, eliminating the need for phone lines and providing faster connections to the World Wide Web. This transformation allowed more people to experience the benefits of the Internet and enjoy seamless online experiences.

Websites and Blogging Are Born

Websites evolved right alongside the Internet. Suddenly, everyone had a GeoCities or Tripod website dedicated to themselves. In their early stages, websites were simple in both function and design. This was also when the blogging craze began to gain popularity with the introduction of " weblogs " (later shortened to "blogs"). Remember Xanga? If only we had known then what we know now.

Floppy Discs: The Real-Life Save Icon

After a few years, the process of sharing information became increasingly convenient. Instead of relying on floppy discs or CD-ROMs, people began exchanging documents through email or storing large files on USB sticks or flash drives. This shift made the transfer of data much more efficient and streamlined.

As new technologies emerged, they built upon one another, resulting in more advanced, efficient, and powerful innovations. This rapid development of the Internet has profoundly impacted the way we live, work, and function in today's world.

The Present: Snaps, Chats, and Double Taps

In just a decade's time, access to the Internet has become almost universal, surpassing the days of dial-up. Nowadays, it is a rare occurrence to find a coffee shop, library, or any place of business without the convenience of Wi-Fi connectivity. Even if Wi-Fi is out of reach, most individuals effortlessly connect to the Internet using their smartphones and personal hotspots through cellular data connections.

Today, the Internet connects people and businesses all around the world. With a simple click, you can video call someone on the other side of the globe, order groceries to be delivered to your doorstep, or even attend classes from prestigious universities without leaving your home. The possibilities seem endless.

There’s an App for That

With this anywhere/anytime access to the Internet, businesses have developed web applications to cater to the common needs of consumers. These applications can do everything from tracking food portions to sending massive amounts of information in a click of a button.  In a world that’s always on the go, these apps provide convenience and efficiency.

The Evolution and Revolution of Communication

Communication has undergone a remarkable evolution. Remember the days of face-to-face conversations? Handwritten letters? Waiting by the phone—the kind with a cord? Technology continuously reshapes how we connect. Today, the most striking difference online is the ability to be personable in an impersonal environment. Constant connection is the name of the game. And with connection comes instant availability. Bluetooth connections, talk-to-text, messaging apps in every form. Whether you're driving, in meetings, or at home, connections are everywhere.

Social Media: Connecting People Like Never Before 

We've watched texting evolve from the simple exchange of text-only messages to the emergence of visual elements, thanks to the widespread popularity of gifs, memes, emojis, and Bitmojis. In fact, with the rise of short-form video sharing, traditional text is becoming more concise (think Snapchat, Instagram Stories and Reels, Facebook Stories, etc.) and accompanied by shorthand abbreviations.

Social media platforms have taken over our lives. As of July 2023, as many as 4.88 billion people, or 59.9% of the world’s population, use social media, according to a Statista study . Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, and TikTok are just a few examples of how people stay connected in today's world. These platforms allow people to share their thoughts, pictures, and videos with friends and followers, making the world a smaller place. People can now connect with others who share similar interests, creating online communities and networks. Although superficial at times, this form of communication helps people stay closer to each other when they would have otherwise lost contact or never met.

Face to Face (Virtually Speaking)

Face-to-face conversations via technology are resurfacing, though, and even strengthening, thanks to higher-quality video and streaming capabilities (enter Skype, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, FaceTime, live streaming, etc.). With more people engaging in web/video conferencing online, geographic barriers that once hindered communication were torn down. Instead, companies can engage with consumers in a more human manner, people can talk to other people face-to-face without the need for costly travel, and reaching out to people all over the world is faster and easier.

The COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped the landscape of video-calling, making it a new norm both in the workplace and at home. As remote work and virtual meetings became necessary for safety, video-calling platforms became essential tools for collaboration and communication. From team meetings to virtual happy hours, video-calling provided a lifeline for maintaining connections in a time of physical distancing. Even with the pandemic in the rearview, the convenience and efficiency of video-calling remains a valuable way to stay connected in a fast-paced, globalized society.

Cutting the Cord: The Era of Video Streaming

Remember when Netflix was a primarily a DVD delivery company, sending your favorite movies through the mail? Back before binge-watching became our new normal.

Today, more and more people are ditching traditional cable , opting for digital streaming and video services like Netflix, YouTube TV, and Hulu. Big brands are trying to keep up and compete, doing their best to one-up each other with original content, availability, and delivery channels (e.g., Apple TV+, Disney Plus, Prime Video, etc.). From our favorite TV shows to live sports events, streaming services have become the go-to for entertainment.

The rise of streaming has also changed the landscape for advertisers. With more people opting out of traditional cable and satellite television, businesses have shifted their focus towards digital advertising on streaming platforms. This allows them to reach a wider audience and target specific demographics with precision.

User-generated content is also a force to acknowledge. Thanks to streaming options like Facebook Live, Instagram Live, and TikTok Live, individuals and businesses can broadcast their own videos and content.  This has made it possible for anyone to create their own brand and have a platform to showcase their talents, ideas, and thoughts.

Today’s Tech Forecast: iCloud Days Ahead

Cloud-based services have revolutionized the way people and companies operate. Instead of relying on a single device, more and more businesses are storing everything online. This shift is transforming traditional office environments and reshaping how people interact with companies. The days of flash drives are numbered, thanks to the prevalence of cloud storage options like iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox, and FTP sites.

With an array of new technologies enabling seamless access to information and fostering connections, the future of technological developments looks incredibly promising.

Floppy disc, CD, flash drive, and a chalk drawing of storing things in the cloud lined up on a black background.

The Future: Emerging Trends on the Horizon

As existing technologies continue to advance and integrate, both consumers and businesses can anticipate a wealth of opportunities with future technology. The pace of technological innovation will accelerate, enabling greater efficiency and productivity in our work. While we can't predict the future with certainty, we can speculate on the evolution of technology based on emerging media and current trends. Here are a few key trends to keep an eye on in the years to come.

Smart is the New Sexy

Smart technology has already seeped into our daily lives through the use of voice assistants, smart home devices, and wearable tech. With the continuous development of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, we can expect to see smarter and more intuitive devices in our households. These advancements will not only provide convenience but also enhance safety and security.

Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) Take Center Stage

Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) have been slowly gaining traction in various industries, but their full potential is yet to be realized. From gaming and entertainment to education, training, and healthcare, AR/VR technology has the power to completely change the way we interact with our environment. As these technologies become more accessible and affordable, we can expect to see a surge in their use and application.

The Internet of Things (IoT)

The Internet of Things (IoT) is all about connecting everyday objects through the Internet. This tech has already made its mark in various gadgets, from smart appliances to cars and wearable fitness trackers. But that's just the beginning. As IoT keeps evolving and merging with other tech, it's poised to revolutionize our daily routines.

Imagine a world where your car alerts you to traffic jams, or your alarm clock tells you your coffee's brewing. That's the IoT magic, blurring the line between the physical and virtual realms. It's like living in a sci-fi movie, with smart speakers, homes, and cars leading the charge.

Think of IoT as a massive network of devices—gadgets, vehicles, home appliances, you name it—all linked up and sharing data. The number of IoT-connected devices worldwide is forecast to almost double from 15.1 billion in 2020 to more than 29 billion IoT devices in 2030. This isn't some distant future; it's happening now, or at least, it's right around the corner.

In short, IoT isn't just a buzzword; it's a game-changer that's already transforming our lives and shaping the future.

Working Remotely: The New Norm

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered an unprecedented transformation in our workforce. Technology played a pivotal role in making remote work the new norm. Video conferencing platforms like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet bridged the physical gap, turning homes into virtual boardrooms and connecting teams across the globe. Collaborative tools such as Slack and Trello ensured seamless coordination, even when separated by miles.

This shift has blurred the boundaries between home and office, with employees setting up home offices equipped with high-speed internet and ergonomic chairs. Remote work has not only freed us from the daily commute but also provided flexible schedules and an improved work-life balance.

For businesses, remote work has presented cost-saving opportunities by reducing overhead costs associated with physical offices and granting access to a global talent pool. Looking ahead, remote work is poised to remain a permanent fixture in our work landscape, reshaping our understanding of the workplace and how we harmonize work and life. It serves as yet another testament to the profound impact of technology on our lives.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) may sound complex, but in simpler terms, it involves teaching computers to think and learn like humans. Over time, technological advancements have propelled AI forward, making it smarter and more capable. Think of AI as the brain behind tools like ChatGPT, which can chat with you like a human, or chatbots that assist with customer service inquiries. These AI-driven creations are just the beginning, showing how machines are learning to understand and interact with us.

The latest leap in AI innovation comes in the form of generative AI, which uses a cutting-edge model called Stable Diffusion to create photorealistic images, animations, and even videos from text and image prompts. For instance, DALL-E 2 can create realistic images and artwork from natural language prompts, blurring the line between human and machine creativity. In the video domain, Next Diffusion stands out, enabling the manipulation of existing video footage to craft entirely new content. Whether it's background inpainting, face swapping, or the creation of hyper-realistic individuals, the possibilities in the realm of video editing are nothing short of remarkable.

AI's influence echoes across industries, transforming how businesses operate. In customer service, AI-powered chatbots provide quick, personalized responses. Supply chain management relies on AI to predict trends and streamline logistics. In healthcare, AI analyzes complex medical data for disease predictions and treatments. Undoubtedly, AI is a game-changer, refining how businesses function and interact with the world.

As we look to the future, AI's trajectory is poised for astonishing heights, promising more personalized content and transformative breakthroughs in healthcare and scientific discovery. AI is our bridge to a future where technology becomes astoundingly human-like in its understanding and abilities.

Why Bother Keeping Up with Technology?

It's a valid question. Technology is in a constant state of flux, and it can sometimes feel overwhelming to keep up with an ever-moving target. But remember, staying abreast of technological advancements adds value to your business .

Remaining up to date ensures that you don't miss out on opportunities, become irrelevant, or lag behind your competitors. Remember Kodak? They taught us a valuable lesson: don't fear embracing change.

Here are a few effective strategies to stay informed and keep pace:

  • Follow industry blogs (including ours !)
  • Listen to industry thought leaders
  • Engage with relevant topics on social media
  • Join online and in-person groups
  • Tune in to tech-focused podcasts
  • Participate in tech forums
  • Subscribe to pertinent e-Newsletters
  • Utilize Google alerts

By implementing these approaches, you can navigate the ever-changing tech landscape with confidence and seize the advantages it presents.

The Final Frontier

In a world where technology knows no bounds, space may not be the final frontier we once imagined. Instead, technology has become its own frontier, an ever-evolving force that reshapes our world daily. With every step we take into the realm of technology, we're forging new habits and discovering novel ways of collaborating and thriving.

While the future remains uncertain, one thing is clear: we firmly believe in harnessing the incredible potential of technology to craft personalized solutions. The power of technology lies not just in its innovation, but in its ability to transform lives and businesses alike.

Ready to embark on your own technological journey? Contact DiscoverTec today and let us guide your business towards harnessing the limitless possibilities of technology.

Published on: October 13, 2023 by Donny Lamey, CEO

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Technology could be what saves us.

Technology in 2050: will it save humanity – or destroy us?

Amid the calamitous effects of climate change, artificial intelligence could make the difference between a livable future or a dystopian one

F uturism is a mug’s game: if you’re right, it seems banal; if you’re wrong, you look like the founder of IBM, Thomas Watson, when he declared in 1943 that there is room in the world “for maybe five computers”.

David Adams knew these risks when he wrote about the future of technology in the Guardian in 2004 – even citing the very same prediction as an example of how they can go awry. And from our vantage point in 2020, Adams certainly did a better job than Watson. When he looked ahead to today, he avoided many of the pitfalls of technology prediction: no promises about flying cars nor sci-fi tech such as teleportation or faster-than-light travel.

But in some ways, the predictions were overly pessimistic. Technology really has made great leaps and bounds in the past 16 years, nowhere more clearly than AI. “Artificial intelligence brains simply cannot cope with change and unpredictable events,” wrote Adams, explaining why robots would be unlikely to interact with humans any time soon.

“Fundamentally, it’s just very difficult to get a robot to tell the difference between a picture of a tree and a real tree,” Paul Newman , then and now a robotics expert at Oxford University, told Adams. Happily, Newman proved his own pessimism to be unwarranted: in 2014, he co-founded Oxbotica, which has hopefully solved the problem he mentioned, because it makes and sells driverless car technology to vehicle manufacturers around the world.

If we move on from worrying over details, there are two key points at which the 2020 predictions fall apart: one about tech, the other about society.

“Gadget lovers could use a single keypad to operate their phone, PDA [tablet] and MP3 music player,” Adams wrote, “or combine the output of their watch, pager and radio into a single speaker.” The idea of greater convergence and connectivity between personal electronics was correct. But there was a very specific hole in this prediction: the smartphone. After half a century of single-purpose consumer electronics, it was difficult to perceive how all-encompassing a single device could become, but just three years after Adams pubished his piece, the iPhone launched and changed everything . Forget carrying around a separate MP3 player; in the real 2020, people aren’t even carrying separate cameras, wallets or car keys.

Failing to foresee the smartphone is an oversight about the progress of technology. But the other missing point is about how society would respond to the changing forces. The 2004 predictions are, fundamentally, optimistic. Adams writes about biometric healthcare data being beamed to your doctor’s computer; about washing machines that automatically arrange their own servicing based on availability in your “electronic organiser”; and about radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips on your clothes that trigger customised adverts or programme your phone based on where you are. And through it all is a sense of trust: these changes will be good, and the companies making them well-intentioned.

Robots are here to stay … an automated production line in China.

“There is a loss of privacy that is going to be very difficult for people and we haven’t figured out how to deal with that,” one of Adams’s interviewees admitted, when describing technology in 2020. “But if you explain what it does, how much information it provides and where it goes – and that the trade-off is that you don’t have to wait as long in line at the supermarket – then people will take the trade-off.” In fact, over the past decade and a half, the vast majority of people were simply never given the choice to accept the trade-off, and it is increasingly clear that many of them never would have if they had understood what was at risk.

If the Guardian missed the advent of the smartphone, despite writing just three years before the launch of the iPhone, how can we possibly do better today, looking 10 times further ahead? The world of 2050 will be unimaginably different in many ways, even if we can safely assume people will still generally have two arms, two legs and an unpleasant smell if they don’t wash for long periods of time.

But there are forces working in our favour. The internet is far more entrenched now than it was in 2004, and while its chaotic effect on our lives shows no sign of abating, it is at least predictably unpredictable. Similarly, smartphone penetration in the west is now as high as it looks likely to go. However the world changes over the next 30 years, it won’t be as a result of more Britons or Americans getting phones.

Other predictions can be as simple as following trendlines to their logical conclusion. By 2050, the switchover to electric cars will have mostly finished, at least in developed nations – as well as in those developing nations, such as China, that are starting to prioritise air quality over cheap mechanisation.

The “next billion” will be online, mostly through low-cost smartphones receiving increasingly ubiquitous cellular connections. But what they do on the internet is harder to guess. In 2020, there are two countervailing trends at work: on the one hand, providers, principally Facebook, have been trying to use subsidised deals to push newly connected nations on to stripped-down versions of the internet. If they succeed at scale, then many of the benefits of the web will be stolen from whole nations, reduced instead to being passive participants in Facebook and a few local media and payment companies.

Who will be the ‘next billion’ users?

But pushback, from national regulators in places such as India and from competing carriers, could bring the new nations to the real internet instead. Unless, that is, national regulators push in a different direction, copying China, Iran and Russia to keep Facebook out by building a purely nationalistic internet. How better to ensure that the benefits of the web accrue domestically, they reason, than by requiring your citizens to use home-grown services? And if it makes it easier to impose censorship, well, that’s just another benefit.

James Bridle, the author of the unsettling book New Dark Age, points out that the discussion can’t lose sight of who the next billion actually are. “I keep thinking about the way the tech industry talks about ‘the next billion users’ without acknowledging that those people are going to be hot, wet and pissed off,” he says, “and we’re only talking about hardening borders, rather than preparing – politically, socially, technologically – for this reality.”

Because, if we are guessing the future from simple trend lines, there is another one that we need to acknowledge: the climate. The specifics of what will change are not for this piece, but the human response very much is.

One possibility is plan A: humanity, in time, reaches net zero when it comes to emissions. In that scenario, we will live in a world where plant proteins replace meat in everyday consumption, where electrically powered networked mass transit reaches into the suburbs and beyond, a world of video-conferencing and remote attendance steadily chipping away at business flights, and of insulation inside the walls of British homes. (Look, it can’t all be high-tech.)

If plan A fails, then there is a chance we turn to plan B. That is a world in which megascale injections of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere turn the heavens a milky-white, and a whole generation never sees a clear blue sky, in order to reflect more of the sun’s rays and pause the greenhouse effect. It is one in which we turn on gigantic processing plants that do nothing but extract carbon dioxide from the air and pump it underground into disused oil wells. It is one in which whole cities are abandoned and populations relocated to avoid the worst effects we can’t prevent.

Plan B – geoengineering – is neither optimistic nor pessimistic about the future of humanity, says Holly Jean Buck, the author of After Geoengineering. “The worst thing would be we fail plan A and plan B. Over the next decade, I think [some form of geoengineering will be tried]’. Right now, it’s toned down, I think because of people not wanting to talk about it. We don’t have the body of knowledge, and would need 20 or 30 years to develop it. Right about midcentury means it will be a crunch point: climate change will be really apparent.”

But for Buck, as for Bridle, the distinctions that really matter aren’t necessarily the technology. “The choices around whether we have a livable future or a dystopian one are about social attitudes and social changes.

“Right now, we’re in this era of stopgaps. Society used to be able to make a long-term plan: people built long-term infrastructure and thought a bit further out. That’s not something that happens now: we go to quick fixes. We need a cultural change in values, to enable more deliberate decision-making.”

In 2004, we failed to foresee the smartphone.

There is another possibility: that technology really does save the day, and then some. John Maeda, the chief experience officer at the digital consultancy Publicis Sapient, says that by 2050, “computational machines will have surpassed the processing power of all the living human brains on Earth. The cloud will also have absorbed the thinking of the many dead brains on Earth, too – and we all need to work together to survive. So I predict that we will see a lasting cooperation between the human race and the computational machines of the future.”

This sort of thinking has come to be known as the singularity: the idea that there will be a point, perhaps even a singular moment in time, when the ability of thinking machines outstrips those who created them, and progress accelerates with dizzying results.

“If you interview AI researchers about when general AI – a machine that can do everything a human can do – will arrive, they think it’s about 50/50 whether it will be before 2050,” says Tom Chivers, the author of The AI Does Not Hate You.

“They also think that AGI” – artificial general intelligence – “can be hugely transformative – lots of them signed an open letter in 2015 saying ‘eradication of disease and poverty’ could be possible. But also,” he adds, citing a 2013 survey in the field, “on average they think there is about a 15% to 20% chance of a ‘very bad outcome [existential catastrophe]’, which means everyone dead.”

There is, perhaps, little point in dwelling on the 50% chance that AGI does develop. If it does, every other prediction we could make is moot, and this story, and perhaps humanity as we know it, will be forgotten. And if we assume that transcendentally brilliant artificial minds won’t be along to save or destroy us, and live according to that outlook, then what is the worst that could happen – we build a better world for nothing?

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Essay on Technology

The word "technology" and its uses have immensely changed since the 20th century, and with time, it has continued to evolve ever since. We are living in a world driven by technology. The advancement of technology has played an important role in the development of human civilization, along with cultural changes. Technology provides innovative ways of doing work through various smart and innovative means. 

Electronic appliances, gadgets, faster modes of communication, and transport have added to the comfort factor in our lives. It has helped in improving the productivity of individuals and different business enterprises. Technology has brought a revolution in many operational fields. It has undoubtedly made a very important contribution to the progress that mankind has made over the years.

The Advancement of Technology:

Technology has reduced the effort and time and increased the efficiency of the production requirements in every field. It has made our lives easy, comfortable, healthy, and enjoyable. It has brought a revolution in transport and communication. The advancement of technology, along with science, has helped us to become self-reliant in all spheres of life. With the innovation of a particular technology, it becomes part of society and integral to human lives after a point in time.

Technology is Our Part of Life:

Technology has changed our day-to-day lives. Technology has brought the world closer and better connected. Those days have passed when only the rich could afford such luxuries. Because of the rise of globalisation and liberalisation, all luxuries are now within the reach of the average person. Today, an average middle-class family can afford a mobile phone, a television, a washing machine, a refrigerator, a computer, the Internet, etc. At the touch of a switch, a man can witness any event that is happening in far-off places.  

Benefits of Technology in All Fields: 

We cannot escape technology; it has improved the quality of life and brought about revolutions in various fields of modern-day society, be it communication, transportation, education, healthcare, and many more. Let us learn about it.

Technology in Communication:

With the advent of technology in communication, which includes telephones, fax machines, cellular phones, the Internet, multimedia, and email, communication has become much faster and easier. It has transformed and influenced relationships in many ways. We no longer need to rely on sending physical letters and waiting for several days for a response. Technology has made communication so simple that you can connect with anyone from anywhere by calling them via mobile phone or messaging them using different messaging apps that are easy to download.

Innovation in communication technology has had an immense influence on social life. Human socialising has become easier by using social networking sites, dating, and even matrimonial services available on mobile applications and websites.

Today, the Internet is used for shopping, paying utility bills, credit card bills, admission fees, e-commerce, and online banking. In the world of marketing, many companies are marketing and selling their products and creating brands over the internet. 

In the field of travel, cities, towns, states, and countries are using the web to post detailed tourist and event information. Travellers across the globe can easily find information on tourism, sightseeing, places to stay, weather, maps, timings for events, transportation schedules, and buy tickets to various tourist spots and destinations.

Technology in the Office or Workplace:

Technology has increased efficiency and flexibility in the workspace. Technology has made it easy to work remotely, which has increased the productivity of the employees. External and internal communication has become faster through emails and apps. Automation has saved time, and there is also a reduction in redundancy in tasks. Robots are now being used to manufacture products that consistently deliver the same product without defect until the robot itself fails. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technology are innovations that are being deployed across industries to reap benefits.

Technology has wiped out the manual way of storing files. Now files are stored in the cloud, which can be accessed at any time and from anywhere. With technology, companies can make quick decisions, act faster towards solutions, and remain adaptable. Technology has optimised the usage of resources and connected businesses worldwide. For example, if the customer is based in America, he can have the services delivered from India. They can communicate with each other in an instant. Every company uses business technology like virtual meeting tools, corporate social networks, tablets, and smart customer relationship management applications that accelerate the fast movement of data and information.

Technology in Education:

Technology is making the education industry improve over time. With technology, students and parents have a variety of learning tools at their fingertips. Teachers can coordinate with classrooms across the world and share their ideas and resources online. Students can get immediate access to an abundance of good information on the Internet. Teachers and students can access plenty of resources available on the web and utilise them for their project work, research, etc. Online learning has changed our perception of education. 

The COVID-19 pandemic brought a paradigm shift using technology where school-going kids continued their studies from home and schools facilitated imparting education by their teachers online from home. Students have learned and used 21st-century skills and tools, like virtual classrooms, AR (Augmented Reality), robots, etc. All these have increased communication and collaboration significantly. 

Technology in Banking:

Technology and banking are now inseparable. Technology has boosted digital transformation in how the banking industry works and has vastly improved banking services for their customers across the globe.

Technology has made banking operations very sophisticated and has reduced errors to almost nil, which were somewhat prevalent with manual human activities. Banks are adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI) to increase their efficiency and profits. With the emergence of Internet banking, self-service tools have replaced the traditional methods of banking. 

You can now access your money, handle transactions like paying bills, money transfers, and online purchases from merchants, and monitor your bank statements anytime and from anywhere in the world. Technology has made banking more secure and safe. You do not need to carry cash in your pocket or wallet; the payments can be made digitally using e-wallets. Mobile banking, banking apps, and cybersecurity are changing the face of the banking industry.

Manufacturing and Production Industry Automation:

At present, manufacturing industries are using all the latest technologies, ranging from big data analytics to artificial intelligence. Big data, ARVR (Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality), and IoT (Internet of Things) are the biggest manufacturing industry players. Automation has increased the level of productivity in various fields. It has reduced labour costs, increased efficiency, and reduced the cost of production.

For example, 3D printing is used to design and develop prototypes in the automobile industry. Repetitive work is being done easily with the help of robots without any waste of time. This has also reduced the cost of the products. 

Technology in the Healthcare Industry:

Technological advancements in the healthcare industry have not only improved our personal quality of life and longevity; they have also improved the lives of many medical professionals and students who are training to become medical experts. It has allowed much faster access to the medical records of each patient. 

The Internet has drastically transformed patients' and doctors’ relationships. Everyone can stay up to date on the latest medical discoveries, share treatment information, and offer one another support when dealing with medical issues. Modern technology has allowed us to contact doctors from the comfort of our homes. There are many sites and apps through which we can contact doctors and get medical help. 

Breakthrough innovations in surgery, artificial organs, brain implants, and networked sensors are examples of transformative developments in the healthcare industry. Hospitals use different tools and applications to perform their administrative tasks, using digital marketing to promote their services.

Technology in Agriculture:

Today, farmers work very differently than they would have decades ago. Data analytics and robotics have built a productive food system. Digital innovations are being used for plant breeding and harvesting equipment. Software and mobile devices are helping farmers harvest better. With various data and information available to farmers, they can make better-informed decisions, for example, tracking the amount of carbon stored in soil and helping with climate change.

Disadvantages of Technology:

People have become dependent on various gadgets and machines, resulting in a lack of physical activity and tempting people to lead an increasingly sedentary lifestyle. Even though technology has increased the productivity of individuals, organisations, and the nation, it has not increased the efficiency of machines. Machines cannot plan and think beyond the instructions that are fed into their system. Technology alone is not enough for progress and prosperity. Management is required, and management is a human act. Technology is largely dependent on human intervention. 

Computers and smartphones have led to an increase in social isolation. Young children are spending more time surfing the internet, playing games, and ignoring their real lives. Usage of technology is also resulting in job losses and distracting students from learning. Technology has been a reason for the production of weapons of destruction.

Dependency on technology is also increasing privacy concerns and cyber crimes, giving way to hackers.

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FAQs on Technology Essay

1. What is technology?

Technology refers to innovative ways of doing work through various smart means. The advancement of technology has played an important role in the development of human civilization. It has helped in improving the productivity of individuals and businesses.

2. How has technology changed the face of banking?

Technology has made banking operations very sophisticated. With the emergence of Internet banking, self-service tools have replaced the traditional methods of banking. You can now access your money, handle transactions, and monitor your bank statements anytime and from anywhere in the world. Technology has made banking more secure and safe.

3. How has technology brought a revolution in the medical field?

Patients and doctors keep each other up to date on the most recent medical discoveries, share treatment information, and offer each other support when dealing with medical issues. It has allowed much faster access to the medical records of each patient. Modern technology has allowed us to contact doctors from the comfort of our homes. There are many websites and mobile apps through which we can contact doctors and get medical help.

4. Are we dependent on technology?

Yes, today, we are becoming increasingly dependent on technology. Computers, smartphones, and modern technology have helped humanity achieve success and progress. However, in hindsight, people need to continuously build a healthy lifestyle, sorting out personal problems that arise due to technological advancements in different aspects of human life.

Technological Advancement Essay

Searching for a technological advancement essay? Look no further! This simple essay on breakthrough technologies describes all the benefits and drawbacks of the issue.

Introduction

Why write about technology advancement, breakthrough technologies in various sectors, technological advancement essay faq.

Technological advancement has taken major strides in bringing liberation to the divergent human wants and gratifications. After keen observation, I have come to realize that technological advancement plays a critical role in solving the major crisis of food shortages in the modern world. In the state of Virginia during the 17th century, human labor was imperative due to the pressing need to grow enough food to serve the people in the community during the winter spell hence the need to hire slaves from Africa to work on their farms (Brush, 1988).

This has since changed partly due to the technological advancements over the years that have led to the replacement of human and animal labor with more efficient energy sources as wind power, hydroelectric and steam energies that ultimately led to a significant increase in productivity. Thus, the thesis statement for this essay is to analyze the impact of technological advancement on people’s lives from ancient times to the present modern world.

It is evident that technology is the backbone of the industrial revolution process that has occurred over the years and leads to a total overhaul from crude systems to modern efficient machinery. With this in mind, we cannot overlook the role that technology has played on the social and economic fronts of many societies hence the need to have a deeper insight and research on this particular topic. The transformation brought about by technological advancement has helped many societies in Africa and the world at large to alleviate poverty and improve their standards of living through the increased food supply and significant growth in the economy and this integrates with the research question: Is technology liberating?

The three academic disciplines from which this research has drawn insight from include: agriculture, sociology and communication sectors.

Technology Advancement in Agriculture

In the ancient world, the main source of power was human labor obtained mainly from slaves. In North America for example, during the early 17th century, most whites purchased slaves as a chief source of labor to work on their farms but with the emancipation proclamation by President Abraham Lincoln during the civil war of 1863 that declared all slaves to be set free from bondage, their masters had no choice but to source for another alternative source of labor.

This act spearheaded the advancement of the agricultural revolution, which was also boosted by the industrial revolution that led to the development of more efficient agricultural machinery that required very few workers and resulted in higher farm production. Examples of some of the medieval technologies used in the ancient world included: water wheel, four-field crop rotation system, the horse collar and selective breeding of livestock with good traits.

In 1750, engineer John Smeaton working on the water wheel significantly increased its efficiency hence boosting its productivity. It was during this period that technological advancement, revolution, and innovation in agriculture were at its peak and it led to the emergence of new farm machinery like cultivators, combine harvesters and mowers that were pulled by oxen, mules, and horses. These machines were later powered by steam energy than a more efficient diesel fuel that led to a remarkable increase in farm output (Kedar, 2009). Previously, the land was prepared by a man using traditional mattocks and hoes made from raw materials obtained locally like wood and scrap metals.

With the mechanization of agriculture, farmers could now make use of the machinery like combine harvesters and petrol powered tractors to prepare large acres of land within a short period with minimum input on human labor to clear, plow and plant on their expansive farms. Technology has led to hybridization, selective breeding and inbreeding in livestock to obtain or maintain all the good qualities in their animals as high milk production, quality wool production, quality meat production, and other desirable animal traits.

Robert Bakewell and Thomas Coke doing their research on selective breeding crossed Lincoln and Longhorn sheep, to produce a hybrid that exhibited all the good qualities of both Lincoln and Longhorn and was referred to as New Leicester variety. This has helped in alleviating the crisis of food shortages through maximization of farm output.

Technology Advancement in Everyday Lives

Technology has been indispensable in bettering the social lives of many people in society. Technological advancements have led to the development in infrastructure and social amenities which has in turn positively impacted on the general livelihood of many individuals. It was until the Roman era in the 18th century that good roads were constructed, during those days, slaves were also used to carry loads and farm produce from the farms to storage warehouses and vice versa. They also used canoes and boats to carry farm products from North America between the Appalachian Mountains and Mississippi River during the early periods of the 19th century.

During this period, the transport system was still archaic and underdeveloped and people found it difficult to navigate from one region to another or carry heavy luggage over long distances because of poor roads and crude modes of transport. The canals preceded the construction of railroads that marked the beginning of the industrial revolution and from there we had significant developments in the transport sector with the construction of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869 and the subsequent construction of tarmac roads, sea canals and subway systems (Butler, 1996).

These developments made it easier for people to move around hence positively impacting on their social lives by enhancing communication, trade, and farming. This indirectly led to improved living standards as a result of the increased food supply by farmers and the development of business firms. Farmers could now effectively carry their farm inputs and fertilizers to the farm and farm products to the market without difficulties. Businesses also thrived because of the efficient transport system and in no time firms began proliferating from every sector of the economy. This enabled them to diversify their economic activities as they no longer depended on the agricultural sector for their daily provision but also ventured into the business sector within the community.

With the recent development in infrastructure, it paved the way to the development of social amenities as schools, hospitals, public toilets, shops and market centers that increased in number as more and more investors joined the market. These amenities played a critical role in the development of the economy and elevating the living standards of the people in the community as they could now easily access all the essential resources. Hence technology played a vital role in liberating the lives of many from the bondage of hunger and scarcity to a point of abundance and stable food supply.

Technology Advancement in Communication

Communication is the act of conveying information from one person to another either face to face or by means of a communication medium. According to Scruton (1996), during the ancient times, slaves used to communicate through hymns, quilts or underground railroads while others used drums to convey coded information since most had originated from Africa and drum beating was their cultural way of communicating. These primitive modes of communications were not very reliable as the information could at times be distorted or misinterpreted by the recipient leading to a communication breakdown.

During the ancient period, people used to communicate through messages carved on stone pillars but this type of communication had limitations as the recipients had to travel miles to receive them and the message could only be read within a certain reading range. Others like the American Indians used smoke to convey a particular message to the community while others used bonfires lit on hilltops but such signals were limited to conveying specific information like looming danger, war or victory.

Communication then developed to more elaborate form which included writing on portable materials like reeds and papyrus. This medium of communication was much more reliable than the earlier archaic communication system. With the emergence of technological advancement and innovations, the transmission of signals from one person to another through a more sophisticated medium like communication cables took center stage. In the early 1830s, the electrical communication system made significant progress in this industry as people could now get in touch through electronic devices like a telephone.

In the year 1833, scientists Carl Friedrich and Wilhelm Eduard Weber researching on the electric transmission devices, made use of the principle of “electromagnetic technology” that later acted as the fundamental basis or a prerequisite for the innovation of telephones (Williams, 1993). Subsequent experiments done by Alexander Bell and Thomas Watson worked to optimize its efficiency and could now be used for commercial purposes. This was later followed by other technological developments and innovations by telecommunication engineers and scientists that led to the production of the carbon microphone, telephone exchange, data storage devices, wireless phones, and computers.

At this point, we can only appreciate the technological advancements that the communication industry has taken overtime to come up with sophisticated and very efficient gadgets that can serve multiple purposes other than communication. Such progress in technology has acted as a remedy to the many communication snarl-ups that people in the ancient world had to contend with but now people can freely share information, ideas, thoughts, opinions, photos, video clips on very many communication platforms using the sophisticated devices and handsets.

For example, use of the internet on computers and mobile phones to share information and ideas across the globe hence making the world a small village and enabling the free flow of information that is objective and informative. Hence this technology could be used to positively impact the lives of people by making them more informed and educated.

In conclusion, technology has had quite a significant impact on people’s lives over the years by making life more bearable through the production of efficient systems that require little labor but produce a significantly high output. One significant finding from the above research is that African culture and tradition has been greatly revolutionized over the years from the archaic, crude and barbaric practices to sophisticated and more efficient processes through technological innovations and advancement. The introduction of western culture has worked to raise the living standards of many African communities that were previously languishing in hunger and poverty.

  • What is technological advancement? Technological advancement implies the emergence and development of technical devices that affect various spheres of peoples’ life. It affects economic, political, social, and other sectors.
  • How does technology affect the advancement of science? Modern technologies make it easier to share information and knowledge, allow scientists from different countries to interact effectively, and also involve the development of new methods of analysis.
  • How does the advancement of technology affect society? Modern technologies influence various spheres of public life. They have significantly changed the labor market, transport and communications. People’s daily lives have become easier and more efficient.
  • How do I start an essay about technology It is a good idea to start your technology advancement with a hook. One option is to use a quote, like the following one by Albert Einstein: “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.” One more option is to use an exciting fact like the following one: Over 6,000 new computer viruses are created and released every month.

Brush, S. G. (1988). The History of Modern Science. A Guide to the Second Scientific Revolution, 35 (10), 5-8.

Butler, G. (1996). A History of Information Technology and Systems. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Kedar, S. (2009). Database Management Systems . Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Scruton, R. (1996 ). The Art of Communication Over the Years. The New Criterion, 15 (30), 9-13.

Williams, T. (1993). A Short History of Technology: From the Earliest Times . New York: Dover Publications.

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Bibliography

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Automotive R&D transformation: Optimizing gen AI’s potential value

Three momentous trends are buffeting the R&D function in the automotive industry, creating the need for profound change.

About the authors

First, the transition from internal combustion engine (ICE) to electric vehicle (EV) technology is a fundamental shift, the likes of which the industry has not experienced since surging oil prices and competition sparked demand for more fuel-efficient vehicles more than a half century ago.

Second is the trend of software-defined vehicles with a central architecture that is more geared toward consumers. Software provides many opportunities for automotive players to differentiate themselves, with such applications as infotainment and advanced driver-assistance systems. However, software also presents companies with the substantial challenge of transforming hardware-centric operations to support their added role as software providers.

The third trend is the emergence of generative AI (gen AI). Gen AI is becoming a powerful technology with the potential to completely reconfigure how R&D teams operate. Although the technology is still in its early days, its ability to generate and process language and imagery, integrate insights from various sources, process information across diverse formats, and produce detailed documentation for regulatory purposes points to a radically different R&D future.

New entrants to the sector—EV manufacturers in China, the United States, and elsewhere—have already successfully implemented R&D process innovations that accelerate new-vehicle time to market, gaining considerable strategic advantages over established players, whose margins are already squeezed.

To better understand the impact and opportunity of these trends, we spoke with executives from leading European automotive and manufacturing companies. The detailed discussions focused primarily on gen AI and the lessons that are emerging from the many gen AI pilots and a few at-scale deployments.

One clear lesson emerged from these discussions: by following a value-focused approach that supports the integration of gen AI throughout the R&D process, companies can capture substantial value in the form of reduced costs, accelerated time to market, improved quality, and more innovation.

Opportunities for gen AI in automotive R&D

About the mckinsey center for future mobility.

These insights were developed by the McKinsey Center for Future Mobility (MCFM). Since 2011, the MCFM has worked with stakeholders across the mobility ecosystem by providing independent and integrated evidence about possible future-mobility scenarios. With our unique, bottom-up modeling approach, our insights enable an end-to-end analytics journey through the future of mobility—from consumer needs to a modal mix across urban and rural areas, sales, value pools, and life cycle sustainability. Contact us if you are interested in getting full access to our market insights via the McKinsey Mobility Insights Portal.

We convened a workshop with 30 R&D executives from leading European automotive and manufacturing companies to discuss their use of and plans for gen AI, exploring a range of opportunities inherent in the technology. Some of these executives also completed a detailed survey on gen AI; their responses are reflected throughout this article. 1 Of the 30 executives who participated in our workshop, 12 completed our survey.

Adoption and investment trends

We found a strong inclination to adopt gen AI in the automotive sector. The majority of companies (75 percent of survey respondents) are experimenting with at least one gen AI application; those that are not plan to start within one year (25 percent of respondents).

Further, investments in gen AI applications for R&D are substantial: more than 40 percent of survey respondents reported that their companies have invested up to €5 million. A few companies—more than 10 percent of respondents—have invested more than €20 million.

Gen AI application in R&D processes

While most of the executives surveyed (70 percent) reported that their companies are integrating gen AI applications into R&D, most pilot programs are limited to one stage of the R&D process. The breadth of piloted use cases is remarkably high (60 percent of use cases we identified); nevertheless, we saw no systematic use of gen AI throughout the R&D process.

The wide range of piloted use cases indicates that executives are largely aiming for a comprehensive future approach to using gen AI in the R&D process. Indeed, more than 40 percent of survey respondents are prioritizing more than 75 percent of potential use cases.

Gen AI’s estimated impact and value

Most participants agreed that most of the gen AI use cases quantified in the survey or during the workshop bring substantial value and could improve R&D processes by 10 to 20 percent. Some participants viewed the potential value of integrating gen AI use cases more as a means of recovering investments in gen AI, while others viewed it as an added expense required to remain competitive with peers. Nonetheless, the prevailing view is that major organizational and cultural transformations are needed to capture gen AI’s full value.

Gen AI use cases and their potential value to R&D

Use cases currently being piloted or investigated by participants’ companies were most likely to focus on requirements engineering (mentioned most in the survey), followed by software testing and validation, and product design and optimization (mentioned by more than half of survey respondents).

Although these are the most frequent areas of focus, each segment of the R&D process has viable gen AI use cases that provide opportunities to reduce costs, increase speed to market, and improve quality. For example, administrative costs could be lowered by using gen AI to complete certain documentation tasks required by regulations, thus freeing up developers’ capacity and improving engineering experience and efficiency.

  • Testing and homologation. The executives we consulted estimated that using gen AI to automate reporting and to generate documentation and scenario-based simulation could improve testing and homologation processes by 20 to 30 percent. Automation could add value by simplifying the creation of essential reports, manuals, and documentation for compliance, product documentation, and quality assurance purposes. And some use cases can deliver exceptional efficiencies: for example, a German tier-one automotive supplier achieved a 70 percent gain in productivity—including the time required for human review of the gen AI–produced output—by using gen AI to generate test vectors such as full branch coverage and modified condition/decision coverage (MCDC). By integrating gen AI into its development process for embedded software and its generation of requirements—using gen AI to help determine requirements for stakeholder requests that could serve as first drafts—the company achieved productivity gains of up to 30 percent for engineers.
  • Design applications. Within the design segment of R&D, the leaders we consulted estimated that generative-design use cases could improve R&D processes by 10 to 20 percent. They also estimated that reverse and black-box engineering use cases could yield 5 to 10 percent improvements in R&D processes by using gen AI to reveal and decode proprietary technologies such as knowledge extraction, algorithm decoding, or reengineering.

Capturing gen AI opportunities

Most of the executives we consulted deemed the barriers to implementing gen AI in R&D as either “large” or “very large”; only 25 percent of survey respondents characterized them as “small.” Indeed, the lack of systematic integration of gen AI into companies’ existing operating models can be attributed to the major organizational and cultural changes such integration requires.

For gen AI applications to add value across the R&D process, a holistic, value-centered approach that goes beyond tech and data is needed. Only by building the range of necessary capabilities and culture can companies expect to reap the benefits of new technologies such as gen AI (exhibit).

A road map centered on value

A surprising number of transformations lack clear and specific targets for value. Without that clarity and alignment at the leadership level, companies struggle to marshal the necessary resources and track progress. Building support and alignment around that value is critical.

  • Frame gen AI as an enabler. A major theme in our discussion with R&D executives was avoiding gen AI backlash in the organization by properly positioning the benefits of gen AI via a preemptive discussion. Presenting gen AI as an enabler and accelerator rather than as a means of cost reduction and job destruction is critical to a successful adoption.

Addressing legal and ethical considerations

When it comes to using gen AI, executives in our discussions and the survey were most concerned about data protection and related legal concerns. While gen AI is initially introduced by tech departments, companies must develop a strong adoption framework that encompasses R&D, legal, risk, and compliance. Companies in the critical-infrastructure space are already facing a rapidly developing regulatory environment to define permissible uses of gen AI, including criteria for data usage and guardrails.

  • Safeguarding proprietary data. It is imperative to ensure that proprietary data does not leak into vendors’ gen AI models and that potentially proprietary data is not being used in gen AI responses. A clear understanding of the terms of service for commercial gen AI offerings can help establish internal rules to guide decision makers in using and protecting proprietary data.
  • Regulatory frameworks and ethics committees. A predefined regulatory framework and a nimble, rapid escalation mechanism to clarify borderline cases can provide the legal and ethical foundation for widespread use of gen AI. This can help protect companies from potential liability claims as well as reduce uncertainty for engineers who are formulating new gen AI use cases. For example, some leading companies are establishing gen AI ethics committees with members from outside the organization to provide an independent perspective on the ethical use of gen AI as case law evolves.
  • Early alignment on guardrails. Responsible and ethical gen AI deployment in automotive R&D requires early agreement on guardrails for the technology and a rapid ethics and legal approval process involving legal, risk, cybersecurity, data protection, and compliance.
  • Clear guidelines and protocols. Establishing clear guidelines and protocols helps ensure compliance with ethical and legal requirements, including data privacy, algorithmic bias, transparency, and accountability. A well-defined and efficient approval process involves clear documentation of objectives, data sources, algorithms used, and potential risks and mitigation strategies. Ongoing monitoring and evaluation of gen AI projects helps maintain the technology’s integrity and supports its trustworthiness and acceptance.
  • A clear and consistent change narrative. Internal stakeholders—chief experience officers, managers, employees, and relevant departments such as legal, ethics, and compliance—should be engaged in the process of defining the change narrative. This collaborative approach ensures that all perspectives within the organization are considered and that the resulting narrative is comprehensive and aligned with the organization’s goals. The change narrative should address ethical considerations, including data privacy, algorithmic bias, transparency, and accountability, and it should be consistently communicated to all stakeholders (see sidebar, “Addressing legal and ethical considerations”). This helps build trust, understanding, and support for gen AI implementation and encourages all members of the organization to support its strategic objectives.
  • Empower C-suite leaders. A crucial first step can be providing C-suite leaders with relevant data and case studies that demonstrate the potential impact of gen AI on the organization’s strategic objectives in a clear and concise manner. In an ideal situation, C-suite leaders are briefed on the ethical and legal considerations of gen AI and the importance of establishing guardrails and nimble ethics and legal approval processes. By modeling a pioneering mindset, C-suite leaders can foster a culture of innovation and experimentation within the organization. R&D departments can support these leaders in ensuring that gen AI is implemented in a responsible and effective manner that maximizes benefits for the organization.
  • Build a visible lighthouse to inspire the organization. This can prove to be a key strategy for R&D departments in automotive. By identifying a high-impact use case for gen AI and showcasing its potential, R&D teams can motivate and inspire the rest of the organization to explore new possibilities and embrace innovation. Once the lighthouse is successful, R&D leadership will need to build a set of mutually reinforcing and supporting use cases. Simply building out use cases in isolation and without coordination often leads to considerable activity but little value.

Empowering and training talent: Two gen AI copilots

Gen AI will certainly affect jobs, but McKinsey analysis indicates that models will often function as copilot applications that support the work employees are already performing. 2 “ The economic potential of generative AI: The next productivity frontier ,” McKinsey, June 14, 2023. The changes will include assuming monotonous tasks, such as writing briefs or drafting documentation. This in turn will enable employees to spend more time on more rewarding tasks—for example, generating ideas and creative solutions and drafting initial code for review. Building talent capabilities can be much more of a training exercise than a hiring objective.

Several R&D organizations have already begun implementing copilots, including one focused on writing requirement documents. Copying and pasting text from different versions of such documents often leads to inconsistencies and, in the worst cases, convoluted documents with unnecessary requirements. A German OEM that implemented this copilot has realized efficiency gains of 20 percent and eased the workloads of several hundred engineers. The copilot has been continuously enhanced with additional features, such as checks against International Organization for Standardization (ISO) norms, that have contributed additional time savings.

Another gen AI copilot, implemented by a German automotive OEM, aims to reduce compliance task preparation time for a broad set of employees. In this case, the gen AI application automatically extracts norms from ISO and similar documents, consolidates them, and checks for adherence to and compliance with existing process documentation. It is expected to reduce audit preparation efforts by 20 to 30 percent when it is eventually expanded to derive to-do items automatically and identify synergies across norms and process documentation.

Workers will need time and training to learn how to best use their copilots, test and build trust in the results, and gain reassurance from interactions that yield the correct answers.

Innovating the operating model

For teams to work quickly and effectively, they need independence, clear guidelines and goals, and access to gen AI tools and capabilities. Given the uncertainties and evolving landscape around risk, experts in the field need to be embedded with working teams to identify issues early on and manage a thoughtful risk review and approval process. Crucial elements include the following:

  • Cross-functional teams. To fully leverage gen AI, companies should establish cross-functional teams consisting of experts from various disciplines who can collaborate effectively to drive innovation. A culture of collaboration and experimentation enables teams to solve complex problems and deliver powerful solutions.
  • Streamlined processes. To unlock the bottom-line potential of gen AI, existing processes must be redesigned and costs must be systematically reduced or removed—for example, by streamlining workflows, eliminating manual process steps, and reshaping roles.
  • Clear mandates. To ensure accountability and drive results, leaders should establish robust mandates that clearly define objectives, deliverables, and timelines for these teams. By empowering teams with the necessary resources and authority, R&D departments can foster a sense of ownership and responsibility among team members, enabling them to achieve their goals and deliver tangible outcomes.

Building technology foundations

Similar to digital use cases, the top barriers to adoption of gen AI use cases include data silos, permission issues, and tech stacks that prove inadequate to support the new technology.

Implementing gen AI depends on scalable infrastructure, which includes robust architecture, efficient resource allocation, and proactive adaptation to evolving technological landscapes. In addition, a coherent but modular data platform is an essential element to a technical foundation that supports a scalable use of gen AI. Ideally, the technology foundation should provide access to different gen AI models to enable broader sets of use cases and support cost-efficient implementation. The vast amount of data to be processed and the open architecture required to integrate with vendor-hosted large language models mean that cloud-based infrastructures and platforms are desirable, as they can provide the flexibility and robustness needed.

Creating robust data governance

A lack of value assurance for data and a lack of training-data availability from suppliers are substantial challenges, highlighting the technical and organizational centrality of data.

Although gen AI does not typically require vast amounts of data to deliver value, most use cases do benefit from systematic prompt enrichment using proprietary data, which needs to be administered with strict data governance to restrict visibility and accessibility of the proprietary data to what is permissible and desirable.

Data ownership, data taxonomy, and ontology are required to feed models with the necessary clean and representative data for training. A comprehensive approach is not ideal; rather, a set of pragmatic solutions for various use cases, introduced in parallel, is more likely to yield success. For example, companies can begin cataloging test cases, establish data governance for these test cases, and create a repository of high-quality test-case data in a structured data lake.

Maintaining strict assurance that solutions are adopted and scaled to capture value

The effects of the transformed R&D process should be carefully measured, evaluated, and corrected where needed. A clear and accepted baseline is essential to demonstrate the positive impact of gen AI.

Similarly, a value capture governance framework and supporting incentives will help avoid unnecessary costs for licenses and training. An organization with a strong business value can help realize bottom-line or top-line benefits enabled by higher productivity and shorter time to market.

R&D departments can be better served by prioritizing gen AI use cases with the highest potential impact and lowest risk. These use cases can then be grouped into waves of deployment based on their complexity and interdependencies, thus delivering tangible business value and building momentum for the next wave of deployments. Collaboration and knowledge sharing across teams and waves can help maximize benefits.

Capturing the value of gen AI in R&D starts with a clear vision for its use and a systematic approach to identifying and prioritizing use cases. Each use case pilot should be followed by developing a product that is supported with robust change management, value accrual, capability building, and a road map outlining the next wave of use cases to transform the entire process chain. Value can be captured only by ensuring that gen AI benefits are applied day to day.

Implementing several use cases, partly in parallel, facilitates successive iteration and refinement of the gen AI approach, strategy, and vision over time. Such an approach ensures a swift and scalable capture of value from gen AI innovations.

Peter Cholewinski is an associate partner in McKinsey’s Berlin office, where Wolf Richter and Matthias Roggendorf are partners and Andreas Venus is a senior partner. Martin Kellner is a partner in the Munich office, where Andreas Tschiesner is a senior partner.

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How technology is reinventing education

Stanford Graduate School of Education Dean Dan Schwartz and other education scholars weigh in on what's next for some of the technology trends taking center stage in the classroom.

technology through the years essay

Image credit: Claire Scully

New advances in technology are upending education, from the recent debut of new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots like ChatGPT to the growing accessibility of virtual-reality tools that expand the boundaries of the classroom. For educators, at the heart of it all is the hope that every learner gets an equal chance to develop the skills they need to succeed. But that promise is not without its pitfalls.

“Technology is a game-changer for education – it offers the prospect of universal access to high-quality learning experiences, and it creates fundamentally new ways of teaching,” said Dan Schwartz, dean of Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE), who is also a professor of educational technology at the GSE and faculty director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning . “But there are a lot of ways we teach that aren’t great, and a big fear with AI in particular is that we just get more efficient at teaching badly. This is a moment to pay attention, to do things differently.”

For K-12 schools, this year also marks the end of the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding program, which has provided pandemic recovery funds that many districts used to invest in educational software and systems. With these funds running out in September 2024, schools are trying to determine their best use of technology as they face the prospect of diminishing resources.

Here, Schwartz and other Stanford education scholars weigh in on some of the technology trends taking center stage in the classroom this year.

AI in the classroom

In 2023, the big story in technology and education was generative AI, following the introduction of ChatGPT and other chatbots that produce text seemingly written by a human in response to a question or prompt. Educators immediately worried that students would use the chatbot to cheat by trying to pass its writing off as their own. As schools move to adopt policies around students’ use of the tool, many are also beginning to explore potential opportunities – for example, to generate reading assignments or coach students during the writing process.

AI can also help automate tasks like grading and lesson planning, freeing teachers to do the human work that drew them into the profession in the first place, said Victor Lee, an associate professor at the GSE and faculty lead for the AI + Education initiative at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning. “I’m heartened to see some movement toward creating AI tools that make teachers’ lives better – not to replace them, but to give them the time to do the work that only teachers are able to do,” he said. “I hope to see more on that front.”

He also emphasized the need to teach students now to begin questioning and critiquing the development and use of AI. “AI is not going away,” said Lee, who is also director of CRAFT (Classroom-Ready Resources about AI for Teaching), which provides free resources to help teach AI literacy to high school students across subject areas. “We need to teach students how to understand and think critically about this technology.”

Immersive environments

The use of immersive technologies like augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality is also expected to surge in the classroom, especially as new high-profile devices integrating these realities hit the marketplace in 2024.

The educational possibilities now go beyond putting on a headset and experiencing life in a distant location. With new technologies, students can create their own local interactive 360-degree scenarios, using just a cell phone or inexpensive camera and simple online tools.

“This is an area that’s really going to explode over the next couple of years,” said Kristen Pilner Blair, director of research for the Digital Learning initiative at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, which runs a program exploring the use of virtual field trips to promote learning. “Students can learn about the effects of climate change, say, by virtually experiencing the impact on a particular environment. But they can also become creators, documenting and sharing immersive media that shows the effects where they live.”

Integrating AI into virtual simulations could also soon take the experience to another level, Schwartz said. “If your VR experience brings me to a redwood tree, you could have a window pop up that allows me to ask questions about the tree, and AI can deliver the answers.”

Gamification

Another trend expected to intensify this year is the gamification of learning activities, often featuring dynamic videos with interactive elements to engage and hold students’ attention.

“Gamification is a good motivator, because one key aspect is reward, which is very powerful,” said Schwartz. The downside? Rewards are specific to the activity at hand, which may not extend to learning more generally. “If I get rewarded for doing math in a space-age video game, it doesn’t mean I’m going to be motivated to do math anywhere else.”

Gamification sometimes tries to make “chocolate-covered broccoli,” Schwartz said, by adding art and rewards to make speeded response tasks involving single-answer, factual questions more fun. He hopes to see more creative play patterns that give students points for rethinking an approach or adapting their strategy, rather than only rewarding them for quickly producing a correct response.

Data-gathering and analysis

The growing use of technology in schools is producing massive amounts of data on students’ activities in the classroom and online. “We’re now able to capture moment-to-moment data, every keystroke a kid makes,” said Schwartz – data that can reveal areas of struggle and different learning opportunities, from solving a math problem to approaching a writing assignment.

But outside of research settings, he said, that type of granular data – now owned by tech companies – is more likely used to refine the design of the software than to provide teachers with actionable information.

The promise of personalized learning is being able to generate content aligned with students’ interests and skill levels, and making lessons more accessible for multilingual learners and students with disabilities. Realizing that promise requires that educators can make sense of the data that’s being collected, said Schwartz – and while advances in AI are making it easier to identify patterns and findings, the data also needs to be in a system and form educators can access and analyze for decision-making. Developing a usable infrastructure for that data, Schwartz said, is an important next step.

With the accumulation of student data comes privacy concerns: How is the data being collected? Are there regulations or guidelines around its use in decision-making? What steps are being taken to prevent unauthorized access? In 2023 K-12 schools experienced a rise in cyberattacks, underscoring the need to implement strong systems to safeguard student data.

Technology is “requiring people to check their assumptions about education,” said Schwartz, noting that AI in particular is very efficient at replicating biases and automating the way things have been done in the past, including poor models of instruction. “But it’s also opening up new possibilities for students producing material, and for being able to identify children who are not average so we can customize toward them. It’s an opportunity to think of entirely new ways of teaching – this is the path I hope to see.”

EU AI Act: first regulation on artificial intelligence

The use of artificial intelligence in the EU will be regulated by the AI Act, the world’s first comprehensive AI law. Find out how it will protect you.

A man faces a computer generated figure with programming language in the background

As part of its digital strategy , the EU wants to regulate artificial intelligence (AI) to ensure better conditions for the development and use of this innovative technology. AI can create many benefits , such as better healthcare; safer and cleaner transport; more efficient manufacturing; and cheaper and more sustainable energy.

In April 2021, the European Commission proposed the first EU regulatory framework for AI. It says that AI systems that can be used in different applications are analysed and classified according to the risk they pose to users. The different risk levels will mean more or less regulation. Once approved, these will be the world’s first rules on AI.

Learn more about what artificial intelligence is and how it is used

What Parliament wants in AI legislation

Parliament’s priority is to make sure that AI systems used in the EU are safe, transparent, traceable, non-discriminatory and environmentally friendly. AI systems should be overseen by people, rather than by automation, to prevent harmful outcomes.

Parliament also wants to establish a technology-neutral, uniform definition for AI that could be applied to future AI systems.

Learn more about Parliament’s work on AI and its vision for AI’s future

AI Act: different rules for different risk levels

The new rules establish obligations for providers and users depending on the level of risk from artificial intelligence. While many AI systems pose minimal risk, they need to be assessed.

Unacceptable risk

Unacceptable risk AI systems are systems considered a threat to people and will be banned. They include:

  • Cognitive behavioural manipulation of people or specific vulnerable groups: for example voice-activated toys that encourage dangerous behaviour in children
  • Social scoring: classifying people based on behaviour, socio-economic status or personal characteristics
  • Biometric identification and categorisation of people
  • Real-time and remote biometric identification systems, such as facial recognition

Some exceptions may be allowed for law enforcement purposes. “Real-time” remote biometric identification systems will be allowed in a limited number of serious cases, while “post” remote biometric identification systems, where identification occurs after a significant delay, will be allowed to prosecute serious crimes and only after court approval.

AI systems that negatively affect safety or fundamental rights will be considered high risk and will be divided into two categories:

1) AI systems that are used in products falling under the EU’s product safety legislation . This includes toys, aviation, cars, medical devices and lifts.

2) AI systems falling into specific areas that will have to be registered in an EU database:

  • Management and operation of critical infrastructure
  • Education and vocational training
  • Employment, worker management and access to self-employment
  • Access to and enjoyment of essential private services and public services and benefits
  • Law enforcement
  • Migration, asylum and border control management
  • Assistance in legal interpretation and application of the law.

All high-risk AI systems will be assessed before being put on the market and also throughout their lifecycle.

General purpose and generative AI

Generative AI, like ChatGPT, would have to comply with transparency requirements:

  • Disclosing that the content was generated by AI
  • Designing the model to prevent it from generating illegal content
  • Publishing summaries of copyrighted data used for training

High-impact general-purpose AI models that might pose systemic risk, such as the more advanced AI model GPT-4, would have to undergo thorough evaluations and any serious incidents would have to be reported to the European Commission.

Limited risk

Limited risk AI systems should comply with minimal transparency requirements that would allow users to make informed decisions. After interacting with the applications, the user can then decide whether they want to continue using it. Users should be made aware when they are interacting with AI. This includes AI systems that generate or manipulate image, audio or video content, for example deepfakes.

On December 9 2023, Parliament reached a provisional agreement with the Council on the AI act . The agreed text will now have to be formally adopted by both Parliament and Council to become EU law. Before all MEPs have their say on the agreement, Parliament’s internal market and civil liberties committees will vote on it.

More on the EU’s digital measures

  • Cryptocurrency dangers and the benefits of EU legislation
  • Fighting cybercrime: new EU cybersecurity laws explained
  • Boosting data sharing in the EU: what are the benefits?
  • EU Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act
  • Five ways the European Parliament wants to protect online gamers
  • Artificial Intelligence Act

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How Essay Writing Has Evolved Through Years and What Is the Role of Technology in This Process?

How Essay Writing Has Evolved Through Years and What Is the Role of Technology in This Process?

When you are looking for a writing company to buy custom essays online, try to be very attentive because cooperation with a reliable service and tech-savvy professional writers will help you become a successful student. Read our article to learn about the role of technology in the educational process.

Essay writing is one of the integral aspects of the academic field. This process enables students to showcase their progress. Essay writing is used in many areas of human life, including literature, sociology, politics, and many others. For example, it is impossible to create an engaging speech without having good essay writing skills. Although many writing companies offer their services so that you could buy custom essays online , students are still struggling with their assignments. Nevertheless, maintaining a successful academic performance is impossible without submitting high-quality essays.

Essay Writing Has Never Been Easy

Over time, the technologies invented by people have changed the writing process. The present-day rules and patterns of essay writing are different from the ones used by ancient Jewish or Greek scholars. Gradually, the definition of writing became vaguer. When writing was invented, people didn’t know about pens, pencils, or computers. In its essence, writing is an instrument that is changing and adapting to meet the needs of people.

Writing remains one of the most efficient forms of visual communication. Yet, it has been changed as a result of technological advancements. Now, to write some text, one doesn’t need to have a pen and paper. It is easier to type the text in Microsoft Word or any other program.

Nowadays, essays have become much more specific and categorized. In the contemporary academic environment, there are many essay types , and each of these types has specific peculiarities. Students work on narrative , argumentative, process, personal, descriptive, and many other essay types. An essay requires looking deeper into the subject, investigating it from different perspectives, as well as presenting the findings in a clear and concise manner. A good essay always has a form of a composition, which includes an engaging introductory paragraph, a detailed main body, and a strong conclusion. To succeed at writing essays, you should familiarize yourself with the characteristic features of this task. Besides, you should know the history because it will help improve your writing competence.

How and Why Does Writing Change Over Time?

  • Creativity. Some people are gifted with artistic imagination. Thus, creativity has shaped human written heritage.
  • Human ergonomics. The Roman cursive script has evolved over several centuries from written capital letters. In some cases, writing can become less functional, which is caused by the path of life. Nowadays, people think more quickly, which affects their writing.
  • Writing technologies. Over the last decades, there have been a lot of significant changes in the means used for writing.

Professionals from different fields work on the improvement of writing techniques. This is how we got various writing formats such as APA, MLA , Harvard, Chicago, and many others. Although each of these formats has specific peculiarities, all of them aim to ease the reading process. By giving a standardized form to any text, one will make it look better. Although some rules and patterns may seem confusing, they offer myriads of options that help contemporary students write good essays.

Effects of Technology on Writing

It is impossible to deny the close relationship between technology and writing. Technology has a great impact on human lives nowadays. Thus, it also defines how students write their essays. Although electronic devices are very helpful, they also define how people think and solve various problems. Technology has provided writers with an efficient toolbox allowing them to deal with various writing tasks without any problems. At the same time, new opportunities may lead to problems, such as plagiarism. Instead of presenting original ideas in their papers students prefer to copy-paste the texts written by others. Copying the works of other people without mentioning their authorship is a violation of the academic writing rules . At the same time, plagiarism-checkers allow noticing the smallest plagiarism instances. In this regard, technology has both positive and negative effects on writing.

How Technology Has Changed Essay Writing?

Over time, many types of writing have evolved. The way people express their ideas today is different from how they did it many years ago. Yet, even with access to text editors, some students create poorly written papers because they commit silly mistakes, which compromise the quality of their works. What is the reason for such a tendency? Well, some things never change. To write a good essay, one should pay close attention to its structure, content, and format. Some students ignore the rules of academic writing, while others just have no time to spend on essay writing.

Nevertheless, the importance of technology in the present-day educational process cannot be underestimated. One should not forget that essay writing is impossible without thorough research, and technology has made it easier. Previously, students had to spend much time at the libraries reading the volumes of books and encyclopedias. Now, the necessary information can be found in a few clicks. Nowadays, technology advances faster than it used to several years ago. Consequently, it affects many aspects of human life including education, work, communication, traveling, etc.

Education has fundamentally changed as a result of technology growth. Now, students use planners, dictionaries, applications, and other resources online to get information and improve their writing strategies. Also, they take advantage of using video tutorials, plagiarism-detection software, etc. Taking this into account, one may conclude that getting an education with the help of cutting-edge technology is more effective.

Students Should Know How to Use Technology

Negative effects of technology.

  • Short forms of writing. Nowadays, texts become more informal and shorter in length. Having access to various technological advances, writers prefer using short forms to complete their works. Thus, the quality of academic texts has reduced because of the short forms used.
  • Writers depend on digital tools. Nowadays, writers become more reliant on technology because it simplifies their work. In some cases, instead of studying the complicated concepts, writers use the software that can do the work instead of them.
  • Plagiarism. Currently, many writers fail to submit 100% authentic papers because they find it easier to copy-paste the works of other people. It affects both their writing skills and their academic performance.

Positive Effects of Technology

Despite the obvious shortcomings, technology also has many positive effects.

  • It improves writers’ research skills. The Internet is the largest source where writers can find information on any topic.
  • It accelerates thorough editing. It has never been easy to edit an academic paper. Yet, by using sophisticated proofreading tools, one may ease this process.
  • It saves time. Technology speeds up the essay writing process and saves students’ time. This time can be spent on many other fascinating activates.
  • It helps get immediate feedback. It is difficult to learn from mistakes without having a clear understanding of what is wrong with the paper. With the help of technology, professors can share their feedback with the students. By communicating with the tutor during the essay writing process, you will increase your chances of getting a good grade.
  • It facilitates checking spelling errors. Modern technology has eased the automation of checking grammatical errors. You don’t need to check on grammatical errors in your papers manually because there are many applications that make this process easier. Even Microsoft Word has this function. You need to press the spellcheck tab, and the software will show incorrectly spelled words;
  • It has made group projects possible. Some projects are too difficult to complete for one person; thus, professors assign them to groups of students. When a student handles only one part of a project, it is easy to check the group work. Besides, technology has made effective communication between group members possible.

The modern world requires taking fast and accurate solutions. In the present-day academic world, students are supposed to complete various projects. No matter what course you are taking, management, accounting, anatomy, nursing , or arts, you need to submit papers of premium quality. All essay assignments aim to showcase your analytical, research, and writing skills.

With the discovery of new knowledge and technologies, essay writing requires multitasking, in-depth research, careful planning, as well as proper organization of ideas.

One cannot deny the fact that the education system is undergoing a revolution, and those students who want to succeed should adapt to it.

In our article, we have discovered the major influences of technology on the educational process. Technology has both advantages and disadvantages, which should be familiar to all students who want to succeed in their educational institutions.

The most common disadvantages of technology use in the educational process are chances of incurring plagiarism, shorter attention, cyber threats, etc.

Students may take advantage of using spellcheck software, citation generators, vocabulary boosters, as well as other instruments to increase their creativity, enhance their communication with peers, and improve their thoughtfulness. At the same time, they should understand that although programs can help them during the writing process, they still should apply considerable efforts to create great papers. To put good grades, professors want to see fresh ideas, thorough work, and unique vision. Finally, with the help of technology, one may carry out their research and get accurate and up-to-date data.

All in all, students can definitely boost their students writing skills with the right technology. You can become a successful student by following the latest conventions of academic writing. Good luck!

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Why Is Big Tech Still Cutting Jobs?

Profits are up and the economy is strong. But the tech industry faces two challenges — dealing with a frenetic work force expansion in the pandemic and building A.I.

Four people stand behind a counter, with another in front and a Microsoft sign behind them.

By Tripp Mickle

Tripp Mickle covers the tech industry from San Francisco.

After a year of big layoffs, job cuts at the tech industry’s largest companies trickled into the first month of 2024.

Google started the year with layoffs of several hundred employees and a promise of more cuts to come. Amazon followed by trimming hundreds of jobs in its Prime Video department. Meta quietly thinned out middle management . Microsoft also cut 1.900 job s in its video game division.

The layoffs continued even as sales and profits jumped and share prices spiked. That disconnect, tech insiders and analysts say, is reflective of an industry facing two big challenges: coming to terms with frenetic work force expansion during the pandemic while also making an aggressive move into building artificial intelligence.

Now, instead of hiring thousands of people every quarter, the companies are spending billions to build A.I. technology that they believe could one day be worth trillions.

Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, said in a call with analysts last week that his company had to lay off employees and control costs “so we can invest in these long-term, ambitious visions around A.I.” He added that he had come to realize that “we operate better as a leaner company.”

From the end of 2019 to 2023, tech companies scrambled to keep up with an explosion of consumer demand, as people stuck at home splurged on new computers and spent much more time online. Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, added a total of more than 900,000 jobs.

When that boom ended, they were forced to adjust. Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Apple cut about 112,000 jobs from their respective peaks in 2021 and 2022. But they were still much bigger and more profitable than before the pandemic began.

Today, the five companies employ 2.16 million people, 71 percent more than they had before the pandemic. Combined, they generated $1.63 trillion in sales in their most recent fiscal years, about 81 percent more revenue than five years earlier.

Wall Street has rewarded them. Over the past year, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Apple have gained nearly $3.5 trillion in market value.

Employment in the broader tech industry, despite notable cuts at a number of other companies, is still positioned for a rebound. In January, tech delivered its second month of job growth, adding 18,000 workers, according to CompTIA, a technology education and research organization. Its unemployment rate of 3.3 percent is below the national average of 3.7 percent .

“We go through these cycles where you see this intense focus on innovation and then the pendulum swings and there’s an intense focus on the bottom line,” said Tim Herbert, CompTIA’s chief research officer. “But when I read that Amazon is cutting back on Alexa workers or Google is cutting staff on its Pixel phone, it tells me there is a focus on margins. They’re trimming where they can and redeploying resources.”

At Major Tech Companies, Stalled Hiring and Layoffs

Headcounts at five major tech companies

1.5 million

Generative artificial intelligence has altered everyone’s business priorities. The technology, which can answer questions, create images and write code, became an overnight sensation after OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT, exploded in popularity.

Tech’s biggest companies are rushing to hire engineers to build A.I. systems. Last year, there were 180,000 job postings in the United States related to A.I., including roles in software development, semiconductor engineering and cloud computing, according to CompTIA. The number of A.I. job openings has expanded this year.

Those employees are helping Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta improve chatbots and build other A.I. systems. Apple is hiring for A.I. engineers, as the company develops its own A.I. offering to release later this year.

“Our M.O., if you will, has always been to do work and then talk about work and not to get out in front of ourselves,” Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, said on a call with analysts last week. “But we’ve got some things that we’re incredibly excited about.”

The companies are spending billions of dollars on the expensive chips and supercomputers necessary to train and build A.I. systems. By the end of the year, Meta expects to have purchased 350,000 of specialized chips from the chip maker Nvidia, which cost an estimated $30,000 each.

The push into generative A.I. has coincided with cuts elsewhere. Google’s layoffs reduced the number of people working on augmented reality technology. Meta, which laid off nearly 20,000 people last year, has been cutting some of its program managers, who oversee different projects and are responsible for keeping teams on schedule.

Over two years, 2020 and 2021, Amazon doubled its work force to 1.6 million employees as it tried to keep up with a surge of e-commerce orders. The hiring included increasing the number of corporate jobs to 380,000 from 200,000. It has since cut about 30,000 corporate jobs and about 50,000 other jobs, according to a person with knowledge of the changes, and its leadership has made clear that those jobs won’t return any time soon.

“We’re looking to hold the line on head count,” Brian Olsavsky, the chief financial officer of Amazon, said during a media call last week.

After laying off more than a thousand employees in January, Google warned employees that rolling layoffs could continue through the year. The exception would be bringing aboard top engineers, Ruth Porat, chief financial officer of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, said during a call with analysts last week.

In contrast with its peers, Apple showed restraint with hiring during the pandemic. But last year, as sales of iPhones, iPads and Macs dropped, the company began to shrink its work force. For the first time in at least 15 years, it reported that its total number of employees declined, even as it avoided making major layoffs.

The 3,000 fewer jobs that Apple reported at the end of its most recent fiscal year were eliminated largely through attrition, and by encouraging some managers to give tougher annual reviews, according to three people with knowledge of the company’s strategy.

An Apple spokesman declined to comment.

Microsoft is the only tech company that didn’t report a reduction in its total number of employees. The company employed 221,000 people at the end of its 2023 fiscal year, equal to its post-pandemic peak.

Investors have rewarded Microsoft’s stability. Last month, it dethroned Apple as the world’s most valuable company. Its market value is now more than $3 trillion.

Nico Grant , Mike Isaac and Karen Weise contributed reporting.

  More about Tripp Mickle

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How Technology Changed Over Time Essay

Introduction Communication used to be relatively limited. At one point, a person could only talk to somebody else in person or send them a written letter. Nowadays, somebody can send somebody else a moving picture with words written on top of it asking them a question, and this message might only be viewable within a certain amount of time, and the message might be one part of many other messages with all sorts of other visually communicative features. Technology is what took communication to where it is today. Technology gave us the power to communicate with anybody anywhere at any time with mobile devices. Technology then evolved to change communication itself. Ideas that once could only be communicated with words can now be expressed through all kinds of different media. How Technological Communication Changed Communication is as old as the first human interaction and it is fundamental to our experiences. As technology changed over time, so did the ways we communicate. At first, people communicated with spoken words in person. Then, people wrote letters to each other so they could talk to each other when they were in different locations. The telephone was the first technology that allowed people to speak out loud to others far away. The technology then evolved so that those telephones could be portable and personal, so that people could move with their technological communication devices. Linge and Sutton (2016) describe this evolution from the British perspective,

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A passion for innovation and education

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Leon Sandler stands in the foyer of an MIT building with his hands in his pockets

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Imagine you were planning a trek across Death Valley. Would you be better off setting out on foot with just a bottle of water in your hand, or in a vehicle loaded with supplies and a full tank of gas?

That’s one of the metaphors Leon Sandler uses to describe the work of the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation — giving MIT researchers and aspiring entrepreneurs the tools they need to successfully spin out their technologies and have an impact on the greater world.

As executive director of the center, Sandler has been at the heart of helping teams pack those figurative vehicles. Now, after 18 years of guiding hundreds of MIT researchers, he is retiring from the role.

“I have had great fun, learned a lot, and met wonderful and interesting people,” Sandler says. “Interacting with MIT faculty and students and watching them learn and grow has been one of the most satisfying experiences of my life.”

The Deshpande Center was founded in 2002 to support faculty as they move their research out of the lab. Its motto, “From innovation to impact,” describes the center itself as well as its mission. Some 550 researchers have benefited from the center’s program, which provides funding and mentoring to projects that have the potential to spin out. More than 50 of those projects have gone on to become startup companies.

“Those companies have made a difference in a wide array of areas, from health care to energy to environment to communications,” Sandler says.

For example: There’s Taris Bio, which developed a drug delivery platform to treat bladder cancer and sold it to Johnson & Johnson. Early results from clinical trials appear promising, and last December, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration designated it as a Breakthrough Device.

There’s Eta Devices, which early in 2023 sold its handset chip business to electronics manufacturer Murata. The technology is reducing power consumption in hundreds of millions of mobile phones.

And there’s the rapidly expanding Gradient, which 10 years after its founding is cleaning wastewater in more than 33 countries. Last spring it was valued at over $1 billion.

Faculty director Angela Koehler, the Kathleen and Curtis Marble Professor in Cancer Research, is herself a former grantee, having spun out a novel cancer therapy into Kronos Bio with help from Sandler and the center. He has also spoken to her undergraduate courses over the years, and his dedication to educating others stands out, she says.

“He is passionate about innovation and entrepreneurship and genuinely cares about both finding the right marketplace for technologies while educating the next generation,” Koehler says. “My colleagues really respect Leon as an educator.

“I just think that Leon is one of the most delightful, funny, and genuine characters that I have come across … He also knows how to throw a good party!”

Setting a mission

Back in 2006, Sandler didn’t expect to stay with the Deshpande Center for long. A startup CEO with a background in chemical engineering, he had been helping entrepreneurs through MIT’s Venture Mentoring Service. When he learned Deshpande was seeking its second executive director, he thought it would be interesting work for a couple of years.

But before long he was hooked, and a couple of years turned into 18.

“I like interacting with people and building relationships, learning about a wide range of topics, and intellectual stimulation and challenge. This job has provided all of them,” Sandler says. “The people and relationships — very bright, very interesting people — I learn from all of them.”

The education works both ways. Sandler came to the Deshpande Center with a strong resume including senior management positions at Texas Instruments, Eastman Kodak, and Digital Equipment before turning to startups and business consulting. He willingly shares his experiences and lessons learned.

Still, he is an engineer first. Sandler often advises anyone starting a new venture — project teams, visitors, colleagues — to start from the essentials. “The question is: What is the problem you’re trying to solve?” he will often say.

That was in essence the first question he asked upon joining the center, determining the mission and core customer base. The answer: advancing MIT research to the point where it could spin out of MIT, attract outside funding, and have an impact on the world.

Unlike other innovation and entrepreneurship programs on campus that guide students, the Deshpande Center focuses on serving faculty members, along with their graduate and postdoc research teams. It accomplishes this by providing grants, but more importantly, mentoring to help projects hoping to form startups.

“ We also discovered that we have a secondary mission of educating faculty and their graduate students on how to commercialize MIT research. They learn by doing,” says Sandler.

A critical part of the Deshpande Center’s success is its corps of volunteer mentors. These mentors, known as catalysts, are as diverse in their technical and industry expertise as the projects that come through the center.

Roughly 25 percent of the projects supported by the center have turned into startups so far, with more on the horizon. Others have made an impact through licensing to existing companies. While some technologies don’t spin out, the researchers still make positive strides. 

“The teams all learn a tremendous amount about the process and about markets and customers.  Some have come back to the Deshpande Center for subsequent projects that have spun out, and others have spun out new research without coming back to us,” Sandler says.

Reflecting on the Deshpande Center’s success over the years, Sandler points to the focus on that core mission and dedication to faculty. Although the staff has historically been small, just three or four people, with the aid of the outstanding mentor corps the center has had a huge impact.

Above all, the relationships forged along the way have been the most satisfying aspect of the job, Sandler says. That includes faculty, mentors, students, and people in different industries or from around the globe seeking to learn more about the center. And after more than 800 grantee project update meetings, he can truly be said to have drunk from the proverbial MIT fire hose.

“It’s been very intellectually stimulating, and I learned so much about so many areas from all the experts, continuously learning for 18 years,” says Sandler.

Even as he prepares for retirement, Sandler is continuing to educate. Over the next few months he will be sticking around the center in an advisory role to help the next executive director into the role.

Sandler is packing a less-figurative vehicle now, loading his own car up with golf clubs and hiking gear. He’s looking forward to spending more time outdoors.

He also offers general advice for faculty, staff and students: Keep learning.

“Read very broadly, well outside of your domain of expertise and comfort zone, and continue to learn,” Sandler advises. “Think critically and apply common sense, yet be open to think ‘out of the box’ and try new approaches.

“Time is your scarcest asset. Spend it on what is meaningful to you. Care about people and behave decently — it will make you feel a lot better.”

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ChatGPT: Everything you need to know about the AI-powered chatbot

technology through the years essay

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm. What started as a tool to hyper-charge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved into a behemoth used by more than 92% of Fortune 500 companies for more wide-ranging needs. And that growth has propelled OpenAI itself into becoming one of the most-hyped companies in recent memory, even if CEO and co-founder Sam Altman’s firing and swift return  raised concerns about its direction and opened the door for competitors.

What does that mean for OpenAI, ChatGPT and its other ambitions? The fallout is still settling, but it might empower competitors like Meta and its LLaMA family of large language models , or help other AI startups get attention and funding as the industry watches OpenAI implode and put itself back together.

While there is a more… nefarious side to ChatGPT, it’s clear that AI tools are not going away anytime soon. Since its initial launch nearly a year ago, ChatGPT has hit 100 million weekly active users , and OpenAI is heavily investing in it.

Prior to the leadership chaos, on November 6, OpenAI held its first developer conference: OpenAI DevDay. During the conference, it announced a slew of updates coming to GPT, including GPT-4 Turbo (a super-charged version of GPT-4 , its latest language-writing model) and a multimodal API . OpenAI also unveiled the GPT store , where users could create and monetize their own custom versions of GPT. Though the launch was delayed in December , it officially launched in January.

GPT-4, which can write more naturally and fluently than previous models, remains largely exclusive to paying ChatGPT users. But you can access GPT-4 for free through Microsoft’s Bing Chat in Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome and Safari web browsers. Beyond GPT-4 and OpenAI DevDay announcements, OpenAI recently connected ChatGPT to the internet for all users. And with the integration of DALL-E 3, users are also able to generate both text prompts and images right in ChatGPT. 

Here’s a timeline of ChatGPT product updates and releases, starting with the latest, which we’ve been updating throughout the year. And if you have any other questions, check out our ChatGPT FAQ here .

Timeline of the most recent ChatGPT updates

February 2024, january 2024, december 2023.

  • November 2023 

October 2023

September 2023, august 2023, february 2023, january 2023, december 2022, november 2022.

  • ChatGPT FAQs

ChatGPT will now remember — and forget — things you tell it to

As part of a test, OpenAI began rolling out new “memory” controls for a small portion of ChatGPT free and paid users, with a broader rollout to follow. The controls let you tell ChatGPT explicitly to remember something, see what it remembers or turn off its memory altogether. Note that deleting a chat from chat history won’t erase ChatGPT’s or a custom GPT’s memories — you must delete the memory itself.

We’re testing ChatGPT's ability to remember things you discuss to make future chats more helpful. This feature is being rolled out to a small portion of Free and Plus users, and it's easy to turn on or off. https://t.co/1Tv355oa7V pic.twitter.com/BsFinBSTbs — OpenAI (@OpenAI) February 13, 2024

OpenAI begins rolling out “Temporary Chat” feature

Initially limited to a small subset of free and subscription users, Temporary Chat lets you have a dialogue with a blank slate. With Temporary Chat, ChatGPT won’t be aware of previous conversations or access memories but will follow custom instructions if they’re enabled.

But, OpenAI says it may keep a copy of Temporary Chat conversations for up to 30 days for “safety reasons.”

Use temporary chat for conversations in which you don’t want to use memory or appear in history. pic.twitter.com/H1U82zoXyC — OpenAI (@OpenAI) February 13, 2024

ChatGPT users can now invoke GPTs directly in chats

Paid users of ChatGPT can now bring GPTs into a conversation by typing “@” and selecting a GPT from the list. The chosen GPT will have an understanding of the full conversation, and different GPTs can be “tagged in” for different use cases and needs.

You can now bring GPTs into any conversation in ChatGPT – simply type @ and select the GPT. This allows you to add relevant GPTs with the full context of the conversation. pic.twitter.com/Pjn5uIy9NF — OpenAI (@OpenAI) January 30, 2024

ChatGPT is reportedly leaking usernames and passwords from users’ private conversations

Screenshots provided to Ars Technica found that ChatGPT is potentially leaking unpublished research papers, login credentials and private information from its users. An OpenAI representative told Ars Technica that the company was investigating the report.

ChatGPT is violating Europe’s privacy laws, Italian DPA tells OpenAI

OpenAI has been told it’s suspected of violating European Union privacy , following a multi-month investigation of ChatGPT by Italy’s data protection authority. Details of the draft findings haven’t been disclosed, but in a response, OpenAI said: “We want our AI to learn about the world, not about private individuals.”

OpenAI partners with Common Sense Media to collaborate on AI guidelines

In an effort to win the trust of parents and policymakers, OpenAI announced it’s partnering with Common Sense Media to collaborate on AI guidelines and education materials for parents, educators and young adults. The organization works to identify and minimize tech harms to young people and previously flagged ChatGPT as lacking in transparency and privacy .

OpenAI responds to Congressional Black Caucus about lack of diversity on its board

After a letter from the Congressional Black Caucus questioned the lack of diversity in OpenAI’s board, the company responded . The response, signed by CEO Sam Altman and Chairman of the Board Bret Taylor, said building a complete and diverse board was one of the company’s top priorities and that it was working with an executive search firm to assist it in finding talent. 

OpenAI drops prices and fixes ‘lazy’ GPT-4 that refused to work

In a blog post , OpenAI announced price drops for GPT-3.5’s API, with input prices dropping to 50% and output by 25%, to $0.0005 per thousand tokens in, and $0.0015 per thousand tokens out. GPT-4 Turbo also got a new preview model for API use, which includes an interesting fix that aims to reduce “laziness” that users have experienced.

Expanding the platform for @OpenAIDevs : new generation of embedding models, updated GPT-4 Turbo, and lower pricing on GPT-3.5 Turbo. https://t.co/7wzCLwB1ax — OpenAI (@OpenAI) January 25, 2024

OpenAI bans developer of a bot impersonating a presidential candidate

OpenAI has suspended AI startup Delphi, which developed a bot impersonating Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) to help bolster his presidential campaign. The ban comes just weeks after OpenAI published a plan to combat election misinformation, which listed “chatbots impersonating candidates” as against its policy.

OpenAI announces partnership with Arizona State University

Beginning in February, Arizona State University will have full access to ChatGPT’s Enterprise tier , which the university plans to use to build a personalized AI tutor, develop AI avatars, bolster their prompt engineering course and more. It marks OpenAI’s first partnership with a higher education institution.

Winner of a literary prize reveals around 5% her novel was written by ChatGPT

After receiving the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for her novel The Tokyo Tower of Sympathy, author Rie Kudan admitted that around 5% of the book quoted ChatGPT-generated sentences “verbatim.” Interestingly enough, the novel revolves around a futuristic world with a pervasive presence of AI.

Sam Altman teases video capabilities for ChatGPT and the release of GPT-5

In a conversation with Bill Gates on the Unconfuse Me podcast, Sam Altman confirmed an upcoming release of GPT-5 that will be “fully multimodal with speech, image, code, and video support.” Altman said users can expect to see GPT-5 drop sometime in 2024.

OpenAI announces team to build ‘crowdsourced’ governance ideas into its models

OpenAI is forming a Collective Alignment team of researchers and engineers to create a system for collecting and “encoding” public input on its models’ behaviors into OpenAI products and services. This comes as a part of OpenAI’s public program to award grants to fund experiments in setting up a “democratic process” for determining the rules AI systems follow.

OpenAI unveils plan to combat election misinformation

In a blog post, OpenAI announced users will not be allowed to build applications for political campaigning and lobbying until the company works out how effective their tools are for “personalized persuasion.”

Users will also be banned from creating chatbots that impersonate candidates or government institutions, and from using OpenAI tools to misrepresent the voting process or otherwise discourage voting.

The company is also testing out a tool that detects DALL-E generated images and will incorporate access to real-time news, with attribution, in ChatGPT.

Snapshot of how we’re preparing for 2024’s worldwide elections: • Working to prevent abuse, including misleading deepfakes • Providing transparency on AI-generated content • Improving access to authoritative voting information https://t.co/qsysYy5l0L — OpenAI (@OpenAI) January 15, 2024

OpenAI changes policy to allow military applications

In an unannounced update to its usage policy , OpenAI removed language previously prohibiting the use of its products for the purposes of “military and warfare.” In an additional statement, OpenAI confirmed that the language was changed in order to accommodate military customers and projects that do not violate their ban on efforts to use their tools to “harm people, develop weapons, for communications surveillance, or to injure others or destroy property.”

ChatGPT subscription aimed at small teams debuts

Aptly called ChatGPT Team , the new plan provides a dedicated workspace for teams of up to 149 people using ChatGPT as well as admin tools for team management. In addition to gaining access to GPT-4, GPT-4 with Vision and DALL-E3, ChatGPT Team lets teams build and share GPTs for their business needs.

OpenAI’s GPT store officially launches

After some back and forth over the last few months, OpenAI’s GPT Store is finally here . The feature lives in a new tab in the ChatGPT web client, and includes a range of GPTs developed both by OpenAI’s partners and the wider dev community.

To access the GPT Store, users must be subscribed to one of OpenAI’s premium ChatGPT plans — ChatGPT Plus, ChatGPT Enterprise or the newly launched ChatGPT Team.

the GPT store is live! https://t.co/AKg1mjlvo2 fun speculation last night about which GPTs will be doing the best by the end of today. — Sam Altman (@sama) January 10, 2024

Developing AI models would be “impossible” without copyrighted materials, OpenAI claims

Following a proposed ban on using news publications and books to train AI chatbots in the UK, OpenAI submitted a plea to the House of Lords communications and digital committee. OpenAI argued that it would be “impossible” to train AI models without using copyrighted materials, and that they believe copyright law “does not forbid training.”

OpenAI claims The New York Times’ copyright lawsuit is without merit

OpenAI published a public response to The New York Times’s lawsuit against them and Microsoft for allegedly violating copyright law, claiming that the case is without merit.

In the response , OpenAI reiterates its view that training AI models using publicly available data from the web is fair use. It also makes the case that regurgitation is less likely to occur with training data from a single source and places the onus on users to “act responsibly.”

We build AI to empower people, including journalists. Our position on the @nytimes lawsuit: • Training is fair use, but we provide an opt-out • "Regurgitation" is a rare bug we're driving to zero • The New York Times is not telling the full story https://t.co/S6fSaDsfKb — OpenAI (@OpenAI) January 8, 2024

OpenAI’s app store for GPTs planned to launch next week

After being delayed in December , OpenAI plans to launch its GPT Store sometime in the coming week, according to an email viewed by TechCrunch. OpenAI says developers building GPTs will have to review the company’s updated usage policies and GPT brand guidelines to ensure their GPTs are compliant before they’re eligible for listing in the GPT Store. OpenAI’s update notably didn’t include any information on the expected monetization opportunities for developers listing their apps on the storefront.

GPT Store launching next week – OpenAI pic.twitter.com/I6mkZKtgZG — Manish Singh (@refsrc) January 4, 2024

OpenAI moves to shrink regulatory risk in EU around data privacy

In an email, OpenAI detailed an incoming update to its terms, including changing the OpenAI entity providing services to EEA and Swiss residents to OpenAI Ireland Limited. The move appears to be intended to shrink its regulatory risk in the European Union, where the company has been under scrutiny over ChatGPT’s impact on people’s privacy.

Study finds white-collar workers are uneasy about using ChatGPT

A study conducted by professors from Harvard and MIT , which is still under review, looked at how ChatGPT could affect the productivity of more than 750 white-collar workers, as well as their complicated feelings about using the tool. The study found that while ChatGPT was helpful with creative tasks, workers were led to more mistakes with analytical work.

The New York Times sues OpenAI and Microsoft over alleged copyright infringement

In a lawsuit filed in the Federal District Court in Manhattan , The Times argues that millions of its articles were used to train AI models without its consent. The Times is asking for OpenAI and Microsoft to “destroy” models and training data containing offending material and to be held responsible for “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages.”

OpenAI re-opens ChatGPT Plus subscriptions

After pausing ChatGPT Plus subscriptions in November due to a “surge of usage,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced they have once again enabled sign-ups. The Plus subscription includes access to GPT-4 and GPT-4 Turbo .

we have re-enabled chatgpt plus subscriptions! 🎄 thanks for your patience while we found more gpus. — Sam Altman (@sama) December 13, 2023

OpenAI and Axel Springer partner up for a “real-time” ChatGPT news deal

OpenAI has struck a new deal with Berlin-based news publisher Axel Springer , which owns Business Insider and Politico, to “help provide people with new ways to access quality, real-time news content through our AI tools.” OpenAI will train its generative AI models on the publisher’s content and add recent Axel Springer-published articles to ChatGPT.

Stanford researchers say ChatGPT didn’t cause an influx in cheating in high schools

New research from Stanford University shows that the popularization of chatbots like ChatGPT has not caused an increase in cheating across U.S. high schools. In a survey of more than 40 U.S. high schools, researchers found that cheating rates are similar across the board this year.

ChatGPT users worry the chatbot is experiencing seasonal depression

Starting in November, ChatGPT users have noticed that the chatbot feels “lazier” than normal, citing instances of simpler answers and refusing to complete requested tasks. OpenAI has confirmed that they are aware of this issue , but aren’t sure why it’s happening.

Some users think it plays into the “winter break hypothesis,” which argues that AI is worse in December because it “learned” to do less work over the holidays , while others wonder if the chatbot is simulating seasonal depression .

we've heard all your feedback about GPT4 getting lazier! we haven't updated the model since Nov 11th, and this certainly isn't intentional. model behavior can be unpredictable, and we're looking into fixing it 🫡 — ChatGPT (@ChatGPTapp) December 8, 2023

Judges in the U.K. are now allowed to use ChatGPT in legal rulings

The U.K. Judicial Office issued guidance that permits judges to use ChatGPT, along with other AI tools, to write legal rulings and perform court duties. The guidance lays out ways to responsibly use AI in the courts, including being aware of potential bias and upholding privacy.

OpenAI makes repeating words “forever” a violation of its terms of service after Google DeepMind test

Following an experiment by Google DeepMind researchers that led ChatGPT to repeat portions of its training data, OpenAI has flagged asking ChatGPT to repeat specific words “forever” as a violation of its terms of service .

Lawmakers in Brazil enact an ordinance written by ChatGPT

City lawmakers in Brazil enacted a piece of legislation written entirely by ChatGPT without even knowing. Weeks after the bill was passed, Porto Alegre councilman Ramiro Rosário admitted that he used ChatGPT to write the proposal, and did not tell fellow council members until after the fact.

OpenAI reportedly delays the launch of its GPT store to 2024

According to a memo seen by Axios , OpenAI plans to delay the launch of its highly anticipated GPT store to early 2024. Custom GPTs and the accompanying store was a major announcement at OpenAI’s DevDay conference , with the store expected to open last month.

November 2023

Chatgpts mobile apps top 110m installs and nearly $30m in revenue.

After launching for iOS and Androidin May and July, ChatGPT’s have topped 110 million combined installs and have reached nearly $30 million in consumer spending, according to a market analysis by data.ai.

ChatGPT celebrates one-year anniversary

OpenAI hit a major milestone: one year of ChatGPT . What began as a “low-key research preview” evolved into a powerhouse that changed the AI industry forever. In a post on X , CEO Sam Altman looked back on the night before its launch: “what a year it’s been…”

a year ago tonight we were probably just sitting around the office putting the finishing touches on chatgpt before the next morning’s launch. what a year it’s been… — Sam Altman (@sama) November 30, 2023

Apple and Google avoid naming ChatGPT as their ‘app of the year’

Neither Apple nor Google chose an AI app as its app of the year for 2023, despite the success of ChatGPT’s mobile app, which became the fastest-growing consumer application in history before the record was broken by Meta’s Threads .

An attack from researchers prompts ChatGPT to reveal training data

A test led by researchers at Google DeepMind found that there is a significant amount of privately identifiable information in OpenAI’s LLMs. The test involved asking ChatGPT to repeat the word “poem” forever, among other words, which over time led the chatbot to churn out private information like email addresses and phone numbers.

ChatGPT and other AI chatbots are fueling an increase in phishing emails

According to a new report by SlashNext , there’s been a 1,265% increase in malicious phishing emails since Q4 of 2022. The report alleges that AI tools like ChatGPT are being prominently used by cybercriminals to write compelling and sophisticated phishing emails .

South Africa officials investigate if President Cyril Ramaphosa used ChatGPT to write a speech

Following speculation, social media users fed portions of Ramaphosa’s November 21 speech in Johannesburg through AI detectors , alleging parts of it may have been written with ChatGPT. South African presidency spokesperson Vincent Magwenya refuted the claims, and local officials are investigating.

ChatGPT Voice can be used to replace Siri

Now that OpenAI’s ChatGPT Voice feature is available to all free users, it can be used to replace Siri on an iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max by configuring the new Action Button. The new feature lets you ask ChatGPT questions and listen to its responses — like a much smarter version of Siri.

Sam Altman returns as CEO

Altman’s return came swiftly , with an “agreement in principle” announced between him and OpenAI’s board that will reinstate him as CEO and restructure the board to include new members, including former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers . The biggest takeaway for ChatGPT is that the members of the board more focused on the nonprofit side of OpenAI, with the most concerns over the commercialization of its tools, have been pushed to the side .

ChatGPT Voice rolls out to all free users

Even if its leadership is in flux, OpenAI is still releasing updates to ChatGPT . First announced in September and granted to paid users on a rolling basis, the text-to-speech model can create a voice from text prompts and a few seconds of speech samples. OpenAI worked with voice actors to create the five voice options, and you can give it a shot by heading to the settings in your mobile ChatGPT apps and tapping the “headphones” icon.

Sam Altman might return, but it’s complicated

The only constant within OpenAI right now is change, and in a series of interviews, Nadella hedged on earlier reporting that Altman and Brockman were headed to Microsoft .

“Obviously, we want Sam and Greg to have a fantastic home if they’re not going to be in OpenAI,” Nadella said in an interview with CNBC, saying that we was “open” to them settling at Microsoft or returning to OpenAI should the board and employees support the move.

Confirmation Sam Altman will not return as OpenAI’s CEO

A number of investors and OpenAI employees tried to bring back Altman after his sudden firing by the company’s board, but following a weekend of negotiations, it was confirmed that Altman would not return to OpenAI and new leadership would take hold. What this means for ChatGPT’s future, and for the OpenAI Dev Day announcements , remains to be seen.

Sam Altman ousted as OpenAI’s CEO

Sam Altman has been fired from OpenAI . He will leave the company’s board and step down as CEO, with OpenAI’s chief technology officer Mira Murati stepping in as interim CEO. In a blog post from OpenAI, the company writes that the board “no longer has confidence in [Altman’s] ability to continue leading OpenAI.”

In a statement on X , Altman said working at OpenAI “was transformative” for him and “hopefully the world.”

OpenAI explores how ChatGPT can be used in the classroom

OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap revealed at a San Francisco conference that the company will likely create a team to identify ways AI and ChatGPT can be used in education . This announcement comes at a time when ChatGPT is being criticized by educators for encouraging cheating , resulting in bans in certain school districts .

OpenAI pauses new ChatGPT Plus subscriptions due to a “surge of usage”

Following OpenAI’s Dev Day conference , Sam Altman announced the company is putting a pause on new subscriptions for its premium ChatGPT Plus offering. The temporary hold on sign-ups, as well as the demand for ChatGPT Plus’ new features like making custom GPTS , has led to a slew of resellers on eBay .

ChatGPT gets flagged as potentially unsafe for kids

An independent review from Common Sense Media, a nonprofit advocacy group, found that  ChatGPT could potentially be harmful for younger users. ChatGPT got an overall three-star rating in the report, with its lowest ratings relating to transparency, privacy, trust and safety. 

OpenAI blames DDoS attack for ChatGPT outage

OpenAI confirmed that a DDoS attack was behind outages affecting ChatGPT and its developer tools. ChatGPT experienced sporadic outages for about 24 hours, resulting in users being unable to log into or use the service.

OpenAI debuts GPT-4 Turbo

OpenAI unveiled GPT-4 Turbo at its first-ever OpenAI DevDay conference. GPT-4 Turbo comes in two versions: one that’s strictly text-analyzing and another that understands the context of both text and images.

GPT-4 gets a fine-tuning

As opposed to the fine-tuning program for GPT-3.5, the GPT-4 program will involve more oversight and guidance from OpenAI teams, the company says — largely due to technical hurdles.

OpenAI’s GPT Store lets you build (and monetize) your own GPT

Users and developers will soon be able to make their own GPT , with no coding experience required. Anyone building their own GPT will also be able to list it on OpenAI’s marketplace and monetize it in the future.

ChatGPT has 100 million weekly active users

After being released nearly a year ago, ChatGPT has 100 million weekly active users . OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also revealed that over two million developers use the platform, including more than 92% of Fortune 500 companies.

OpenAI launches DALL-E 3 API, new text-to-speech models

DALL-E 3, OpenAI’s text-to-image model , is now available via an API after first coming to ChatGPT-4 and Bing Chat. OpenAI’s newly released text-to-speech API, Audio API, offers six preset voices to choose from and two generative AI model variants.

OpenAI promises to defend business customers against copyright claims

Bowing to peer pressure, OpenAI it will pay legal costs incurred by customers who face lawsuits over IP claims against work generated by an OpenAI tool. The protections seemingly don’t extend to all OpenAI products, like the free and Plus tiers of ChatGPT.

As OpenAI’s multimodal API launches broadly, research shows it’s still flawed

OpenAI announced that GPT-4 with vision will become available alongside the upcoming launch of GPT-4 Turbo API. But some researchers found that the model remains flawed in several significant and problematic ways.

OpenAI launches API, letting developers build ‘assistants’ into their apps

At its OpenAI DevDay, OpenAI announced the Assistants API to help developers build “agent-like experiences” within their apps. Use cases range from a natural language-based data analysis app to a coding assistant or even an AI-powered vacation planner.

ChatGPT app revenue shows no signs of slowing, but it’s not #1

OpenAI’s chatbot app far outpaces all others on mobile devices in terms of downloads, but it’s surprisingly not the top AI app by revenue . Several other AI chatbots, like  “Chat & Ask AI” and “ChatOn — AI Chat Bot Assistant”, are actually making more money than ChatGPT.

ChatGPT tests the ability to upload and analyze files for Plus users

Subscribers to ChatGPT’s Enterprise Plan have reported new beta features, including the ability to upload PDFs to analyze and and ask questions about them directly. The new rollout also makes it so users no longer have to manually select a mode like DALL-E and browsing when using ChatGPT. Instead, users will automatically be switched to models based on the prompt.

ChatGPT officially gets web search

OpenAI has formally launched its internet-browsing feature to ChatGPT, some three weeks after re-introducing the feature in beta after several months in hiatus. The AI chatbot that has historically been limited to data up to September, 2021.

OpenAI integrates DALL-E 3 into ChatGPT

The integration means users don’t have to think so carefully about their text-prompts when asking DALL-E to create an image. Users will also now be able to receive images as part of their text-based queries without having to switch between apps.

Microsoft-affiliated research finds flaws in GPT-4

A Microsoft-affiliated scientific paper looked at the “trustworthiness” — and toxicity — of LLMs, including GPT-4. Because GPT-4 is more likely to follow the instructions of “jailbreaking” prompts, the co-authors claim that GPT-4 can be more easily prompted than other LLMs to spout toxic, biased text .

ChatGPT’s mobile app hits record $4.58M in revenue in September

OpenAI amassed 15.6 million downloads and nearly $4.6 million in gross revenue across its iOS and Android apps worldwide in September. But revenue growth has now begun to slow , according to new data from market intelligence firm Appfigures — dropping from 30% to 20% in September.

ChatGPT can now browse the internet (again)

OpenAI posted on Twitter/X that ChatGPT can now browse the internet and is no longer limited to data before September 2021. The chatbot had a web browsing capability for Plus subscribers back in July , but the feature was taken away after users exploited it to get around paywalls.

ChatGPT can now browse the internet to provide you with current and authoritative information, complete with direct links to sources. It is no longer limited to data before September 2021. pic.twitter.com/pyj8a9HWkB — OpenAI (@OpenAI) September 27, 2023

ChatGPT now has a voice

OpenAI announced that it’s adding a new voice for verbal conversations and image-based smarts to the AI-powered chatbot.

Poland opens an investigation against OpenAI

The Polish authority publically announced it has opened an investigation regarding ChatGPT — accusing the company of a string of breaches of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

OpenAI unveils DALL-E 3

The upgraded text-to-image tool, DALL-E 3, uses ChatGPT to help fill in prompts. Subscribers to OpenAI’s premium ChatGPT plans, ChatGPT Plus  and  ChatGPT Enterprise , can type in a request for an image and hone it through conversations with the chatbot — receiving the results directly within the chat app.

Opera GX integrates ChatGPT-powered AI

Powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the AI browser Aria  launched on Opera in May to give users an easier way to search, ask questions and write code. Today, the company announced it is bringing Aria to Opera GX , a version of the flagship Opera browser that is built for gamers.

The new feature allows Opera GX users to interact directly with a browser AI to find the latest gaming news and tips.

OpenAI releases a guide for teachers using ChatGPT in the classroom

OpenAI wants to rehabilitate the system’s image a bit when it comes to education, as ChatGPT has been controversial in the classroom due to plagiarism. OpenAI has offered up a selection of ways to put the chatbot to work in the classroom.

OpenAI launches ChatGPT Enterprise

ChatGPT Enterprise can perform the same tasks as ChatGPT, such as writing emails, drafting essays and debugging computer code. However, the new offering also adds “enterprise-grade” privacy and data analysis capabilities on top of the vanilla ChatGPT, as well as enhanced performance and customization options.

Survey finds relatively few American use ChatGPT

Recent Pew polling suggests the language model isn’t quite as popular or threatening as some would have you think. Ongoing polling by Pew Research shows that although ChatGPT is gaining mindshare, only about 18% of Americans have ever actually used it .

OpenAI brings fine-tuning to GPT-3.5 Turbo

With fine-tuning, companies using GPT-3.5 Turbo through the company’s API can make the model better follow specific instructions. For example, having the model always respond in a given language. Or improving the model’s ability to consistently format responses, as well as hone the “feel” of the model’s output, like its tone, so that it better fits a brand or voice. Most notably, fine-tuning enables OpenAI customers to shorten text prompts to speed up API calls and cut costs.

OpenAI is partnering with Scale AI to allow companies to fine-tune GPT-3.5 . However, it is unclear whether OpenAI is developing an in-house tuning tool that is meant to complement platforms like Scale AI or serve a different purpose altogether.

Fine-tuning costs:

  • Training: $0.008 / 1K tokens
  • Usage input: $0.012 / 1K tokens
  • Usage output: $0.016 / 1K tokens

OpenAI acquires Global Illumination

In OpenAI’s first public acquisition in its seven-year history, the company announced it has acquired Global Illumination, a New York-based startup leveraging AI to build creative tools, infrastructure and digital experiences.

“We’re very excited for the impact they’ll have here at OpenAI,” OpenAI wrote in a brief  post published to its official blog. “The entire team has joined OpenAI to work on our core products including ChatGPT.”

The ‘custom instructions’ feature is extended to free ChatGPT users

OpenAI announced that it’s expanding custom instructions to all users, including those on the free tier of service. The feature allows users to add various preferences and requirements that they want the AI chatbot to consider when responding.

China requires AI apps to obtain an administrative license

Multiple generative AI apps have been removed from Apple’s China App Store ahead of the country’s latest generative AI regulations that are set to take effect August 15.

“As you may know, the government has been tightening regulations associated with deep synthesis technologies (DST) and generative AI services, including ChatGPT. DST must fulfill permitting requirements to operate in China, including securing a license from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT),” Apple said in a letter to OpenCat, a native ChatGPT client. “Based on our review, your app is associated with ChatGPT, which does not have requisite permits to operate in China.”

ChatGPT for Android is now available in the US, India, Bangladesh and Brazil

A few days after putting up a preorder page on Google Play, OpenAI has flipped the switch and  released ChatGPT for Android . The app is now live in a handful of countries.

ChatGPT is coming to Android

ChatGPT is available to “pre-order” for Android users.

The ChatGPT app on Android  looks to be more or less identical to the iOS one in functionality, meaning it gets most if not all of the web-based version’s features. You should be able to sync your conversations and preferences across devices, too — so if you’re iPhone at home and Android at work, no worries.

OpenAI launches customized instructions for ChatGPT

OpenAI launched custom instructions for ChatGPT users , so they don’t have to write the same instruction prompts to the chatbot every time they interact with it.

The company said this feature lets you “share anything you’d like ChatGPT to consider in its response.” For example, a teacher can say they are teaching fourth-grade math or a developer can specify the code language they prefer when asking for suggestions. A person can also specify their family size, so the text-generating AI can give responses about meals, grocery and vacation planning accordingly.

The FTC is reportedly investigating OpenAI

The FTC is reportedly in at least the exploratory phase of investigation over whether OpenAI’s flagship ChatGPT conversational AI made “false, misleading, disparaging or harmful” statements about people.

TechCrunch Reporter Devin Coldewey reports:

This kind of investigation doesn’t just appear out of thin air — the FTC doesn’t look around and say “That looks suspicious.” Generally a lawsuit or formal complaint is brought to their attention and the practices described by it imply that regulations are being ignored. For example, a person may sue a supplement company because the pills made them sick, and the FTC will launch an investigation on the back of that because there’s evidence the company lied about the side effects.

OpenAI announced the general availability of GPT-4

Starting July 6, all existing OpenAI developers “with a history of successful payments” can access GPT-4 . OpenAI plans to open up access to new developers by the end of July.

In the future, OpenAI says that it’ll allow developers to fine-tune GPT-4 and  GPT-3.5 Turbo , one of the original models powering ChatGPT, with their own data, as has long been possible with several of OpenAI’s other text-generating models. That capability should arrive later this year, according to OpenAI.

ChatGPT app can now search the web only on Bing

OpenAI announced that subscribers to ChatGPT Plus can now use a new feature on the app called Browsing , which allows ChatGPT to search Bing for answers to questions.

The Browsing feature can be enabled by heading to the New Features section of the app settings, selecting “GPT-4” in the model switcher and choosing “Browse with Bing” from the drop-down list. Browsing is available on both the iOS and Android ChatGPT apps.

Mercedes is adding ChatGPT to its infotainment system

U.S. owners of Mercedes models that use MBUX will be able to opt into a beta program starting June 16 activating the ChatGPT functionality . This will enable the highly versatile large language model to augment the car’s conversation skills. You can join up simply by telling your car “Hey Mercedes, I want to join the beta program.”

It’s not really clear what for, though.

ChatGPT app is now available on iPad, adds support for Siri and Shortcuts

The new ChatGPT app version brings native iPad support to the app , as well as support for using the chatbot with Siri and Shortcuts. Drag and drop is also now available, allowing users to drag individual messages from ChatGPT into other apps.

On iPad, ChatGPT now runs in full-screen mode, optimized for the tablet’s interface.

Texas judge orders all AI-generated content must be declared and checked

The Texas federal judge has added a requirement that any attorney appearing in his court must attest that “no portion of the filing was drafted by generative artificial intelligence,” or if it was, that it was checked “by a human being.”

ChatGPT app expanded to more than 30 countries

The list of new countries includes Algeria, Argentina, Azerbaijan, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Estonia, Ghana, India, Iraq, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Lithuania, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mexico, Morocco, Namibia, Nauru, Oman, Pakistan, Peru, Poland, Qatar, Slovenia, Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates.

ChatGPT app is now available in 11 more countries

OpenAI announced in a tweet that the ChatGPT mobile app is now available on iOS in the U.S., Europe, South Korea and New Zealand, and soon more will be able to download the app from the app store. In just six days, the app topped 500,000 downloads .

The ChatGPT app for iOS is now available to users in 11 more countries — Albania, Croatia, France, Germany, Ireland, Jamaica, Korea, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Nigeria, and the UK. More to come soon! — OpenAI (@OpenAI) May 24, 2023

OpenAI launches a ChatGPT app for iOS

ChatGPT is officially going mobile . The new ChatGPT app will be free to use, free from ads and will allow for voice input, the company says, but will initially be limited to U.S. users at launch.

When using the mobile version of ChatGPT, the app will sync your history across devices — meaning it will know what you’ve previously searched for via its web interface, and make that accessible to you. The app is also integrated with  Whisper , OpenAI’s open source speech recognition system, to allow for voice input.

Hackers are using ChatGPT lures to spread malware on Facebook

Meta said in a report on May 3 that malware posing as ChatGPT was on the rise across its platforms . The company said that since March 2023, its security teams have uncovered 10 malware families using ChatGPT (and similar themes) to deliver malicious software to users’ devices.

“In one case, we’ve seen threat actors create malicious browser extensions available in official web stores that claim to offer ChatGPT-based tools,” said Meta security engineers Duc H. Nguyen and Ryan Victory in  a blog post . “They would then promote these malicious extensions on social media and through sponsored search results to trick people into downloading malware.”

ChatGPT parent company OpenAI closes $300M share sale at $27B-29B valuation

VC firms including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive and K2 Global are picking up new shares, according to documents seen by TechCrunch. A source tells us Founders Fund is also investing. Altogether the VCs have put in just over $300 million at a valuation of $27 billion to $29 billion . This is separate to a big investment from Microsoft announced earlier this year , a person familiar with the development told TechCrunch, which closed in January. The size of Microsoft’s investment is believed to be around $10 billion, a figure we confirmed with our source.

OpenAI previews new subscription tier, ChatGPT Business

Called ChatGPT Business, OpenAI describes the forthcoming offering as “for professionals who need more control over their data as well as enterprises seeking to manage their end users.”

“ChatGPT Business will follow our API’s data usage policies, which means that end users’ data won’t be used to train our models by default,” OpenAI  wrote in a blog post. “We plan to make ChatGPT Business available in the coming months.”

OpenAI wants to trademark “GPT”

OpenAI applied for a trademark for “GPT,” which stands for “Generative Pre-trained Transformer,” last December. Last month, the company petitioned the USPTO to speed up the process, citing the “myriad infringements and counterfeit apps” beginning to spring into existence.

Unfortunately for OpenAI, its petition was  dismissed  last week. According to the agency, OpenAI’s attorneys neglected to pay an associated fee as well as provide “appropriate documentary evidence supporting the justification of special action.”

That means a decision could take up to five more months.

Auto-GPT is Silicon Valley’s latest quest to automate everything

Auto-GPT is an open-source app created by game developer Toran Bruce Richards that uses OpenAI’s latest text-generating models, GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, to interact with software and services online, allowing it to “autonomously” perform tasks.

Depending on what objective the tool’s provided, Auto-GPT can behave in very… unexpected ways. One Reddit  user  claims that, given a budget of $100 to spend within a server instance, Auto-GPT made a wiki page on cats, exploited a flaw in the instance to gain admin-level access and took over the Python environment in which it was running — and then “killed” itself.

FTC warns that AI technology like ChatGPT could ‘turbocharge’ fraud

FTC chair Lina Khan and fellow commissioners warned House representatives of the potential for modern AI technologies, like ChatGPT, to be used to “turbocharge” fraud in a congressional hearing .

“AI presents a whole set of opportunities, but also presents a whole set of risks,” Khan told the House representatives. “And I think we’ve already seen ways in which it could be used to turbocharge fraud and scams. We’ve been putting market participants on notice that instances in which AI tools are effectively being designed to deceive people can place them on the hook for FTC action,” she stated.

Superchat’s new AI chatbot lets you message historical and fictional characters via ChatGPT

The company behind the popular iPhone customization app  Brass , sticker maker  StickerHub  and  others  is out today with a new AI chat app called  SuperChat , which allows iOS users to chat with virtual characters powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT . However, what makes the app different from the default experience or the dozens of generic AI chat apps now available are the characters offered which you can use to engage with SuperChat’s AI features.

Italy gives OpenAI to-do list for lifting ChatGPT suspension order

Italy’s data protection watchdog has laid out what OpenAI needs to do for it to lift an order against ChatGPT issued at the  end of last month — when it said it suspected the AI chatbot service was in breach of the EU’s GSPR and ordered the U.S.-based company to stop processing locals’ data.

The DPA has given OpenAI a deadline — of April 30 — to get the regulator’s compliance demands done. (The local radio, TV and internet awareness campaign has a slightly more generous timeline of May 15 to be actioned.)

Researchers discover a way to make ChatGPT consistently toxic

A study co-authored by scientists at the Allen Institute for AI shows that assigning ChatGPT a “persona” — for example, “a bad person,” “a horrible person” or “a nasty person” — through the ChatGPT API increases its toxicity sixfold. Even more concerning, the co-authors found having the conversational AI chatbot pose as certain historical figures, gendered people and members of political parties also increased its toxicity — with journalists, men and Republicans in particular causing the machine learning model to say more offensive things than it normally would.

The research was conducted using the latest version, but not the model currently in preview based on OpenAI’s GPT-4 .

Y Combinator-backed startups are trying to build ‘ChatGPT for X’

YC Demo Day’s Winter 2023 batch features no fewer than four startups that claim to be building “ChatGPT for X.” They’re all chasing after a customer service software market that’ll be worth $58.1 billion by 2023, assuming the rather optimistic prediction from Acumen Research comes true.

Here are the YC-backed startups that caught our eye:

  • Yuma , whose customer demographic is primarily Shopify merchants, provides ChatGPT-like AI systems that integrate with help desk software, suggesting drafts of replies to customer tickets.
  • Baselit , which uses one of OpenAI’s text-understanding models to allow businesses to embed chatbot-style analytics for their customers.
  • Lasso customers send descriptions or videos of the processes they’d like to automate and the company combines ChatGPT-like interface with robotic process automation (RPA) and a Chrome extension to build out those automations.
  • BerriAI , whose platform is designed to help developers spin up ChatGPT apps for their organization data through various data connectors.

Italy orders ChatGPT to be blocked

OpenAI has started geoblocking access to its generative AI chatbot, ChatGPT, in Italy .

Italy’s data protection authority has just put out a timely reminder that some countries do have laws that already apply to cutting edge AI: it has  ordered OpenAI to stop processing people’s data locally with immediate effect. The Italian DPA said it’s concerned that the ChatGPT maker is breaching the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and is opening an investigation.

1,100+ signatories signed an open letter asking all ‘AI labs to immediately pause for 6 months’

The letter’s signatories include Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and Tristan Harris of the Center for Humane Technology, among others. The letter calls on “all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.”

The letter reads:

Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks,[3] and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization? Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders. Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.

OpenAI connects ChatGPT to the internet

OpenAI launched plugins for ChatGPT, extending the bot’s functionality by granting it access to third-party knowledge sources and databases, including the web. Available in alpha to ChatGPT users and developers on the waitlist , OpenAI says that it’ll initially prioritize a small number of developers and subscribers to its premium ChatGPT Plus plan before rolling out larger-scale and  API  access.

OpenAI launches GPT-4, available through ChatGPT Plus

GPT-4 is a powerful image- and text-understanding AI model from OpenAI. Released March 14, GPT-4 is available for paying ChatGPT Plus users and through a public API. Developers can sign up on a waitlist to access the API.

ChatGPT is available in Azure OpenAI service

ChatGPT is generally available through the Azure OpenAI Service , Microsoft’s fully managed, corporate-focused offering. Customers, who must already be “Microsoft managed customers and partners,” can apply here for special access .

OpenAI launches an API for ChatGPT

OpenAI makes another move toward monetization by launching a paid API for ChatGPT . Instacart, Snap (Snapchat’s parent company) and Quizlet are among its initial customers.

Microsoft launches the new Bing, with ChatGPT built in

At a press event in Redmond, Washington, Microsoft announced its long-rumored integration of OpenAI’s GPT-4 model into Bing , providing a ChatGPT-like experience within the search engine. The announcement spurred a 10x increase in new downloads for Bing globally, indicating a sizable consumer demand for new AI experiences.

Other companies beyond Microsoft joined in on the AI craze by implementing ChatGPT, including OkCupid , Kaito , Snapchat and Discord — putting the pressure on Big Tech’s AI initiatives, like Google .

OpenAI launches ChatGPT Plus, starting at $20 per month

After ChatGPT took the internet by storm, OpenAI launched a new pilot subscription plan for ChatGPT called ChatGPT Plus , aiming to monetize the technology starting at $20 per month. A month prior, OpenAI posted a waitlist for “ChatGPT Professional” as the company began to think about monetizing the chatbot.

OpenAI teases ChatGPT Professional

OpenAI said that it’s “starting to think about how to monetize ChatGPT” in an announcement on the company’s official Discord server. According to a waitlist link OpenAI posted in Discord, the monetized version will be called ChatGPT Professional . The waitlist document includes the benefits of this new paid version of the chatbot which include no “blackout” windows, no throttling and an unlimited number of messages with ChatGPT — “at least 2x the regular daily limit.”

ShareGPT lets you easily share your ChatGPT conversations

A week after ChatGPT was released into the wild , two developers — Steven Tey and Dom Eccleston — made a Chrome extension called ShareGPT to make it easier to capture and share the AI’s answers with the world.

ChatGPT first launched to the public as OpenAI quietly released GPT-3.5

GPT-3.5 broke cover with ChatGPT , a fine-tuned version of GPT-3.5 that’s essentially a general-purpose chatbot. ChatGPT can engage with a range of topics, including programming, TV scripts and scientific concepts. Writers everywhere rolled their eyes at the new technology, much like artists did with OpenAI’s DALL-E model , but the latest chat-style iteration seemingly broadened its appeal and audience.

What is ChatGPT? How does it work?

ChatGPT is a general-purpose chatbot that uses artificial intelligence to generate text after a user enters a prompt, developed by tech startup OpenAI . The chatbot uses GPT-4, a large language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text.

When did ChatGPT get released?

November 30, 2022 is when ChatGPT was released for public use.

What is the latest version of ChatGPT?

Both the free version of ChatGPT and the paid ChatGPT Plus are regularly updated with new GPT models. The most recent model is GPT-4 .

Can I use ChatGPT for free?

There is a free version of ChatGPT that only requires a sign-in in addition to the paid version, ChatGPT Plus .

Who uses ChatGPT?

Anyone can use ChatGPT! More and more tech companies and search engines are utilizing the chatbot to automate text or quickly answer user questions/concerns.

What companies use ChatGPT?

Multiple enterprises utilize ChatGPT, although others may limit the use of the AI-powered tool .

Most recently, Microsoft announced at it’s 2023 Build conference that it is integrating it ChatGPT-based Bing experience into Windows 11. A Brooklyn-based 3D display startup Looking Glass utilizes ChatGPT to produce holograms you can communicate with by using ChatGPT.  And nonprofit organization Solana officially integrated the chatbot into its network with a ChatGPT plug-in geared toward end users to help onboard into the web3 space.

What does GPT mean in ChatGPT?

GPT stands for Generative Pre-Trained Transformer.

What’s the difference between ChatGPT and Bard?

Much like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Bard is a chatbot that will answer questions in natural language. Google announced at its 2023 I/O event that it will soon be adding multimodal content to Bard, meaning that it can deliver answers in more than just text, responses can give you rich visuals as well. Rich visuals mean pictures for now, but later can include maps, charts and other items.

ChatGPT’s generative AI has had a longer lifespan and thus has been “learning” for a longer period of time than Bard.

What is the difference between ChatGPT and a chatbot?

A chatbot can be any software/system that holds dialogue with you/a person but doesn’t necessarily have to be AI-powered. For example, there are chatbots that are rules-based in the sense that they’ll give canned responses to questions.

ChatGPT is AI-powered and utilizes LLM technology to generate text after a prompt.

Can ChatGPT write essays?

Can chatgpt commit libel.

Due to the nature of how these models work , they don’t know or care whether something is true, only that it looks true. That’s a problem when you’re using it to do your homework, sure, but when it accuses you of a crime you didn’t commit, that may well at this point be libel.

We will see how handling troubling statements produced by ChatGPT will play out over the next few months as tech and legal experts attempt to tackle the fastest moving target in the industry.

Does ChatGPT have an app?

Yes, there is now a free ChatGPT app that is currently limited to U.S. iOS users at launch. OpenAi says an android version is “coming soon.”

What is the ChatGPT character limit?

It’s not documented anywhere that ChatGPT has a character limit. However, users have noted that there are some character limitations after around 500 words.

Does ChatGPT have an API?

Yes, it was released March 1, 2023.

What are some sample everyday uses for ChatGPT?

Everyday examples include programing, scripts, email replies, listicles, blog ideas, summarization, etc.

What are some advanced uses for ChatGPT?

Advanced use examples include debugging code, programming languages, scientific concepts, complex problem solving, etc.

How good is ChatGPT at writing code?

It depends on the nature of the program. While ChatGPT can write workable Python code, it can’t necessarily program an entire app’s worth of code. That’s because ChatGPT lacks context awareness — in other words, the generated code isn’t always appropriate for the specific context in which it’s being used.

Can you save a ChatGPT chat?

Yes. OpenAI allows users to save chats in the ChatGPT interface, stored in the sidebar of the screen. There are no built-in sharing features yet.

Are there alternatives to ChatGPT?

Yes. There are multiple AI-powered chatbot competitors such as Together , Google’s Bard and Anthropic’s Claude , and developers are creating open source alternatives . But the latter are harder — if not impossible — to run today.

The Google-owned research lab DeepMind claimed that its next LLM, will rival, or even best, OpenAI’s ChatGPT . DeepMind is using techniques from AlphaGo, DeepMind’s AI system that was the first to defeat a professional human player at the board game Go, to make a ChatGPT-rivaling chatbot called Gemini.

Apple is developing AI tools to challenge OpenAI, Google and others. The tech giant created a chatbot that some engineers are internally referring to as “Apple GPT,” but Apple has yet to determine a strategy for releasing the AI to consumers.

How does ChatGPT handle data privacy?

OpenAI has said that individuals in “certain jurisdictions” (such as the EU) can object to the processing of their personal information by its AI models by filling out  this form . This includes the ability to make requests for deletion of AI-generated references about you. Although OpenAI notes it may not grant every request since it must balance privacy requests against freedom of expression “in accordance with applicable laws”.

The web form for making a deletion of data about you request is entitled “ OpenAI Personal Data Removal Request ”.

In its privacy policy, the ChatGPT maker makes a passing acknowledgement of the objection requirements attached to relying on “legitimate interest” (LI), pointing users towards more information about requesting an opt out — when it writes: “See here  for instructions on how you can opt out of our use of your information to train our models.”

What controversies have surrounded ChatGPT?

Recently, Discord announced that it had integrated OpenAI’s technology into its bot named Clyde where two users tricked Clyde into providing them with instructions for making the illegal drug methamphetamine (meth) and the incendiary mixture napalm.

An Australian mayor has publicly announced he may sue OpenAI for defamation due to ChatGPT’s false claims that he had served time in prison for bribery. This would be the first defamation lawsuit against the text-generating service.

CNET found itself in the midst of controversy after Futurism reported the publication was publishing articles under a mysterious byline completely generated by AI. The private equity company that owns CNET, Red Ventures, was accused of using ChatGPT for SEO farming, even if the information was incorrect.

Several major school systems and colleges, including New York City Public Schools , have banned ChatGPT from their networks and devices. They claim that the AI impedes the learning process by promoting plagiarism and misinformation, a claim that not every educator agrees with .

There have also been cases of ChatGPT accusing individuals of false crimes .

Where can I find examples of ChatGPT prompts?

Several marketplaces host and provide ChatGPT prompts, either for free or for a nominal fee. One is PromptBase . Another is ChatX . More launch every day.

Can ChatGPT be detected?

Poorly. Several tools claim to detect ChatGPT-generated text, but in our tests , they’re inconsistent at best.

Are ChatGPT chats public?

No. But OpenAI recently disclosed a bug, since fixed, that exposed the titles of some users’ conversations to other people on the service.

Who owns the copyright on ChatGPT-created content or media?

The user who requested the input from ChatGPT is the copyright owner.

What lawsuits are there surrounding ChatGPT?

None specifically targeting ChatGPT. But OpenAI is involved in at least one lawsuit that has implications for AI systems trained on publicly available data, which would touch on ChatGPT.

Are there issues regarding plagiarism with ChatGPT?

Yes. Text-generating AI models like ChatGPT have a tendency to regurgitate content from their training data.

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